Gerhard Ludwig Weinberg (born January 1, 1928) is a German-born American diplomatic and military historian noted for his studies in the history of World War II. Weinberg currently is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been a member of the history faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1974. Previously he served on the faculties of the University of Michigan (1959–1974) and the University of Kentucky (1957–1959).

Youth and education[link]

Weinberg was born in Hanover, Germany, and resided there the first ten years of his life. As Jews in Nazi Germany, he and his family suffered increasing persecution. They emigrated in 1938, first to the United Kingdom and then in 1941 to New York State. Weinberg became a U.S. citizen, served in the U.S. Army during its occupation of Japan in 1946-1947, and returned to receive a B.A. in social studies from the State University of New York at Albany. He received his MA (1949) and PhD (1951) in history from the University of Chicago.

Early career[link]

Weinberg has studied the foreign policy of National Socialist Germany and the Second World War for his entire professional life. His doctoral dissertation (1951), directed by Hans Rothfels, was "German Relations with Russia, 1939-1941," subsequently published in 1954 as Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939-1941. From 1951 to 1954 Weinberg was a Research Analyst for the War Documentation Project at Columbia University and was Director of the American Historical Association Project for Microfilming Captured German Documents in 1956-1957. After joining the project to microfilm captured records at Alexandria, Virginia, in the 1950s, Weinberg published the Guide to Captured German Documents (1952).^[1] In 1958, Weinberg made the notable discovery of Hitler's so-called Zweites Buch (Second Book), an unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, among captured German files. His find led to his publication in 1961 of Hitlers zweites Buch: Ein Dokument aus dem Jahr 1928, later published in English as Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf (2003).

In 1953-1954, Weinberg was involved in a major scholarly debate with Hans-Günther Seraphim and Andreas Hillgruber on the pages of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte journal over the question of whether Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a “preventive war” forced on Hitler by fears of an imminent Soviet attack. Seraphim and Hillgruber argued for the “preventive war” thesis, which Weinberg stoutly opposed. Rothfels, editor of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, was annoyed by Hillgruber’s and Seraphim’s arguments and invited Weinberg to write a reply to their article. Weinberg argued that the German invasion was primarily prompted by Nazi racial theories concerning the necessity of winning Lebensraum at the expense of Russia together with Hitler’s ideological animosity towards what Hitler often called the “Judeo-Bolshevik” regime in the Soviet Union, and that the evidence for Soviet plans for an invasion of Germany in 1941 was slight. In the opinion of most historians, Weinberg effectively demolished Hillgruber’s and Seraphim’s case. This marked the beginning of the first of many clashes between Weinberg and Hillgruber over interpretations of German foreign policy, though it should be noted that in regard to the intentionalist-functionalist and globalist-continentalist debates (see below), the views of Weinberg and Hillgruber were quite similar. In a 1956 review of Hillgruber’s book Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu, Weinberg accused Hillgruber of engaging at times in a pro-German apologia such as asserting that World War II began with the Anglo-French declarations of war against Germany on September 3, 1939, rather than the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.^[2] In his 1980 monograph The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany Starting World War II 1937-1939, Weinberg noted that about the question of the war's origins that "my view is somewhat different" from Hillgruber's.^[3] In his 1981 book World in the Balance, Weinberg stated that "Hillgruber's interpretation is not, however, followed here".^[4] In his 1994 book A World At Arms, Weinberg called Hillgruber's thesis presented in his book Zweierlei Untergang - Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (Two Kinds of Ruin The Smashing of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry) "...a preposterous reversal of the realities".^[5] Weinberg sarcastically commented that if the German Army had held out longer against the Red Army in 1945 as Hillgruber had wished, the result would not have been the saving of more German lives as Hillgruber had claimed, but rather an American atomic bombing of Germany.^[5]

Another major scholarly debate involving Weinberg occurred in 1962-1963 when Weinberg wrote a review of David Hoggan’s 1961 book Der erzwungene Krieg for the American Historical Review, which claimed that the outbreak of war in 1939 had been due to an Anglo-Polish conspiracy against Germany. Weinberg wrote a hostile review generally considered quite devastating, in which Weinberg suggested Hoggan had probably engaged in forging documents (the charge was later confirmed). Weinberg noted that Hoggan’s method comprised taking of all Hitler’s “peace speeches” at face value, and simply ignored evidence in favor of German intentions for aggression such as the Hossbach Memorandum.^[6] Moreover, Weinberg noted that Hoggan often rearranged events in a chronology designed to support his thesis such placing the Polish rejection of the German demand for the return of the Free City of Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland) to the Reich in October 1938 in 1939, thereby giving a false impression that the Polish refusal to consider changing the status of Danzig was due to British pressure.^[7] Finally, Weinberg noted that Hoggan had appeared to engage in forgery by manufacturing documents and attributing statements that were not found in documents in the archives.^[8] As an example, Weinberg noted during a meeting between Neville Chamberlain and Adam von Trott zu Solz in June 1939, Hoggan had Chamberlain saying that the British guarantee of Polish independence given on March 31, 1939 “did not please him personally at all. He thereby gave the impression that Halifax was solely responsible for British policy”.^[9] As Weinberg noted, what Chamberlain actually said was:

“Do you [Trott zu Solz] believe that I undertook these commitments gladly? Hitler forced me into them!”^[9]

Subsequently both Hoggan and his mentor Harry Elmer Barnes wrote a series of letters to the American Historical Review protesting Weinberg’s review and attempting to rebut his arguments. Weinberg in turn published letters rebutting Barnes's and Hoggan’s claims.

Major scholarly works[link]

Weinberg's early masterpiece was the two-volume history of Hitler's diplomatic preparations for war: The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany (1970 and 1980; republished 1994). In this work, Weinberg portrayed a Hitler committed to his ideology, no matter how inane or stupid it might seem to others, and therefore as a leader determined to use foreign policy to effect a specific set of goals. Weinberg thus countered others, such as British historian A.J.P. Taylor, who had argued in The Origins of the Second World War (1962) that Hitler had acted like a traditional statesman in taking advantage of the weaknesses of foreign rivals. The first volume of The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany received the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association in 1971.

Weinberg's attention then turned to the Second World War. He published dozens of articles on the war and volumes of collected essays such as World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II (1981). All such work was preparation for the release in 1994 of his 1000-page one-volume history of the Second World War, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. Weinberg continued his studies of the World War II era even after the publication of his general history by examining the conceptions of World War II's leaders about the world they thought they were fighting to create. It was published in 2005 as Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders. In this book, Weinberg looked at what eight leaders were hoping to see after the war ended. The eight leaders profiled were Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, General Hideki Tōjō, Chiang Kai-shek, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, General Charles de Gaulle, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Weinberg has continued to be a harsh critic of those who claim that Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler. In a very hostile review of Ernst Topitsch's book Stalin's War, Weinberg called those who promote the preventive war thesis as believers in "fairy tales".^[10] In 1996, Weinberg was somewhat less harsh than in his review of Topitsch's book, but still very critical in his assessment of the Czech historian R.C. Raack's book Stalin's Drive to the West (which did not accept the preventive war thesis, but argued that Soviet foreign policy was far more aggressive than many other historians would accept, and Western leaders too pliant in their dealings with Stalin)^[11]

In the globalist versus continentalist debate, concerning whether Hitler had ambitions to conquer the entire world or merely the continent of Europe, Weinberg takes a globalist view, arguing Hitler had plans for world conquest. On the question of whether Hitler intended to murder Europe's Jews before coming to power, Weinberg takes an intentionalist position, arguing that Hitler had formulated ideas for the Holocaust by the time he wrote Mein Kampf. In a 1994 article, Weinberg strongly criticized the American functionalist historian Christopher Browning for arguing that the decision to launch the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was taken in September–October 1941.^[12] In Weinberg’s view, July 1941 was the more probable date^[12] In the same article Weinberg praised the work of the American historian Henry Friedlander for arguing that the origins of the Holocaust can be traced to the Action T4 program, which began in January 1939^[13] Finally, Weinberg strongly praised the thesis put forward by the American historian Richard Breitman that planning for the Shoah began during the winter of 1940-41, but argued that Breitman missed what Weinberg argued was a crucial point, that because the T4 program had generated public protests, the Einsatzgruppen massacres of Jews in the Soviet Union were intended as a sort of “trial run” to gauge reaction of the German people to genocide.^[14]

A major theme of Weinberg’s work about the origins of the Second World War has been a revised picture of Neville Chamberlain and the Munich Agreement. Based on his study of German documents, Weinberg established that the demands Hitler had made concerning the cession of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia were not intended to be accepted, but were rather to provide a pretext for aggression against the latter state.^[15] Weinberg has established that Hitler regarded the Munich Agreement as a diplomatic defeat that deprived Germany of the war that was intended to be begin on October 1, 1938.^[16] Weinberg has argued against the thesis that Chamberlain was responsible for the failure of the proposed putsch in Germany in 1938.^[17] Weinberg has argued that the three visits to London in the summer of 1938 of three messengers from the opposition, each bearing the same message that if only Britain would promise to go to war if Czechoslovakia was attacked, then a putsch would remove the Nazi regime, each ignorant of the other messengers' existence, presented a picture of a group of people apparently not very well organized, and that it is unreasonable for historians to have expected Chamberlain to stake all upon the uncorroborated words of such a badly disorganized group.^[17] In a 2007 review of Ian Kershaw's book Fateful Choices, Weinberg, though generally favorable to Kershaw, commented that Chamberlain played a far more important role in the decision to fight on despite the great German victories in the spring of 1940 and in ensuring that Churchill was his successor instead of the peace-minded Lord Halifax, than Kershaw gave him credit for.^[18] Weinberg’s picture of Chamberlain has led to criticism; the American historian Williamson Murray condemned Weinberg for his “…attempts to present the British Prime Minister in as a favorable light as possible”.^[19]

Hitler diaries controversy[link]

In 1983, when the German illustrated weekly magazine Der Stern sensationally reported its purchase of the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler, the U.S. weekly magazine Newsweek asked Weinberg to examine them hurriedly in a bank vault in Zürich, Switzerland. Together with Hugh Trevor-Roper and Eberhard Jäckel, Weinberg was one of the three experts on Hitler asked to examine the alleged diaries.

Squeezing the visit into just a few hours so as not to miss any of his teaching assignments at Chapel Hill, Weinberg reported in Newsweek that "on balance I am inclined to consider the material authentic." But Weinberg also noted that the purported journals would likely add less to our understanding of the Second World War than many might have thought and that more work would be needed to "make the verdict [of authenticity] airtight." When that work was undertaken by the German Federal Archives, the "diaries" were deemed forgeries.

Professional accomplishments[link]

Weinberg supervised over two dozen Ph.D. dissertations during his career, along with many more M.A. theses. In 2003 thirteen of his former doctoral students presented him with a Festschrift honoring his contributions to the study of history and to their lives (The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy). Weinberg was elected president of the German Studies Association in 1996.

Weinberg has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Fulbright professor at the University of Bonn, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum among many other such honors.

In June 2009, Weinberg was selected to receive the $100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for lifetime excellence in military writing, sponsored by the Chicago-based Tawani Foundation.

Life today[link]

Weinberg resides in Efland, North Carolina, with his wife Janet.

See also[link]

• List of books by or about Adolf Hitler

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Croan, Melvin Review of The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Starting World War II, 1937-1939 pages 114-115 from Slavic Review, Volume 42, Issue # 1, Spring 1983.
• Dawidowicz, Lucy S. Review of The Foreign Policy Of Hitler's Germany pages 91–93 from Commentary, Volume 52, Issue # 2, August 1971.
• Diehl, James Review of A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II pages 755-756 from The Journal of Military History, Volume 58, Issue # 4, October 1994.
• Dorn, Walter Review of Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939-1941 pages 295-297 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 28, Issue # 3, September 1956.
• Fisher, H.H. Review of Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939-1941 pages 152-153 from Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume 302, November 1955.
• Harris, Robert. Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries. London: Faber and Faber, 1986 ISBN 0-571-14726-7.
• Hauner, Milan Review of A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II pages 873-874 from The American Historical Review, Volume 100, Issue # 3, June 1995
• Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. London: Arnold; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-340-76028-1.
• Kulski, W.W. Review of Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939-1941 pages 417-419 from American Slavic and East European Review, Volume 14,Issue # 3, October 1955.
• Krammer, Arnold Review of World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II pages 341-342 from German Studies Review, Volume 6, Issue # 2, May 1983.
• Lewin, Ronald Review of World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II page 107 from International Affairs, Volume 59, Issue # 1, Winter 1982-1983.
• Snell, John Review of The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933-36 pages 891-892 from Slavic Review, Volume 30, Issue # 4, December 1971.
• Steinweis, Alan E. and Daniel E. Rogers, eds., The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2003 ISBN 0-8032-4299-9.
• "Stages to War: An Examination of Gerhard Weinberg's "The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany"" by Radomír V. Luža, F. Gregory Campbell and Anna M. Cienciala pages 297-315 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 57, Issue # 2, June 1985.
• Parker, R.A.C. Review of A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II pages 792-793 from International Affairs, Volume 70, Issue # 4, October 1994
• Reynolds, P.A. Review of Germany and the Soviet Union 1939-1941 page 229 from International Affairs, Volume 31, Issue # 2, April 1955.
• Riekhoff, Harald von “Continuity and Change in German Détente Strategy Toward Poland: Comments on Professor Weinberg’s Paper” pages 24–29 from Polish Review, Volume 20, Issue # 1.
• Robbins, Keith Review of The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933-36 pages 672-672 from The English Historical Review, Volume 88, Issue # 348, July 1973.
• Taylor, A.J.P. Review of The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933-36 pages 140-143 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 44, Issue # 1 March 1972.
• Watt, D.C. Review of The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Starting World War II, 1937-1939 pages 411-414 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 54, Issue # 2, June 1982.
• Wesson, Robert Review of Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939-1941 pages 218-219 from Russian Review, Volume 32, Issue # 2, April 1973
• Wiskemann, Elizabeth Review of Hitlers Zweites Buch: Ein Dokument aus dem Jahr 1928 pages 229-230 from International Affairs, Volume 38, Issue # 2, April 1962

External links[link]

On Weinberg[link]

• Article on Weinberg and Interview with Him by the University of North Carolina
• Dr. Gerhard Weinberg: World War II Scholar and Teacher (Metro Magazine, January 2006)
• Revealed: The Amazing Story behind Hitler's Second Book
• Over There, and There, and There Review of A World In Arms
• He Meant What He Said: Review of Zweites Buch
• Review of Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History

By Weinberg[link]

• No Road From Munich To Iraq
• Review of Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker by Nicolas Berg
• The United States in World War II
• Review of Fateful Choices by Ian Kershaw.
• Review of Dagmar Barnouw's The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans
• Review of Hitler: The Rise of Evil
• Statement of Gerhard L. Weinberg before the U.S. House of Representatives Banking Committee
• Lecture by Weinberg on New Boundaries for the World: The Post-War Visions of Eight World War II Leaders

Works by Gerhard L. Weinberg[link]

Books[link]

• Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939-1941, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1954.
• The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933–36, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 ISBN 0-226-88509-7.
• (editor) Transformation of a Continent: Europe in the Twentieth Century. Minneapolis, Minn.: Burgess Pub. Co., 1975 ISBN 0-8087-2332-4.
• The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Starting World War II, 1937-1939. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 ISBN 0-226-88511-9.
• World in the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II, Hanover, New Hampshire: Published for Brandeis University Press by University Press of New England, 1981 ISBN 0-87451-216-6.
• A World at Arms : A Global History of World War II, Cambridge [Eng.]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, revised edition 2005 ISBN 0-521-44317-2. online edition
• Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History. Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1995 ISBN 0-521-47407-8.
• Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005 ISBN 0-521-85254-4.
• Hitler's Foreign Policy, 1933-1939: The Road to World War II. New York: Enigma Books, 2010 ISBN 978-1-929631-91-9.

Articles and reviews[link]

• “A Critical Note on the Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945” pages 38–40 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 23, Issue # 1, March 1951.
• Guide to Captured German Documents. Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University, Human Resources Research Institute, 1952.
• "Der deutsche Entschluß zum Angriff auf die Sowjetunion" pages 301-318 from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte Volume 1, Issue # 4 1953.
• The Partisan Movement in the Yelnya-Dorogobuzh Area of Smolensk Oblast, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air Research and Development Command, Human Resources Research Institute Headquarters, United States Air Force, 1954.
• "A Proposed Compromise over Danzig in 1939?" pages 334-338 from Journal of Central European Affairs, Volume 14, Issue 4, January 1955.
• Review of Wen Sie verderben wollen: Bericht des grossen Verrats by Jürgen Thorwald pages 83–85 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 27, Issue # 1, March 1955.
• “Hitler's Private Testament of May 2, 1938” pages 415-419 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 27, Issue # 4, December 1955.
• Review of Die deutsche Besetzung von Dänemark und Norwegen 1940, nach amtlichen Unterlagen dargestellt by Walther Hubatsch pages 432-433 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 27, Issue # 4, December 1955.
• Review of Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu: die deutsch-rumänischen Beziehungen, 1938-1944 by Andreas Hillgruber pages 80–82 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 28, Issue # 1, March 1956.
• "Deutsch-japanische Verhandlungen über das Südseemanddat, 1937-1938" pages 390-398 from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 4, Issue 4, October 1956.
• Review of Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers: 1938 pages 409-410 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 28, Issue # 4, December 1956.
• Review of Das deutsche Reich und Polen, 1932-1937: Aussenpolitik und Volksgruppenfragen by Richard Breyer pages 403-404 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 28, Issue # 4, December 1956.
• "German Recognition of Manchoukuo" pages 149-164 from World Affairs Quarterly, Volume 28, Issue #2, July 1957.
• "The May Crisis, 1938" pages 213-225 from The Journal of Modern History Volume 29, Issue # 3 September 1957.
• Review of The Reichswehr and the German Republic, 1919-1926 by Harold J. Gordon pages 414-415 from The American Historical Review, Volume 63, Issue # 2, January 1958.
• Review of Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945 pages 63–64 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 31, Issue # 1, March 1959.
• Supplement to the Guide to Captured German Documents. Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration, 1959.
• Review of Correspondence between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. and the Presidents of the U.S.A. and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 pages 142-143 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 31, Issue # 2, June 1959.
• "Secret Hitler-Beneš Negotiations in 1936-37" pages 366-374 from Journal of Central European Affairs, Volume 19, Issue 4, January 1960.
• Review of Logistical Support of the Armies by Roland G. Ruppenthal page 195 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 32, Issue # 2, June 1960.
• Review of Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945 page 420 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 32, Issue # 4, December 1960.
• Review of Die Verspätete Nation: Über die Politische Verführbarkeit Bürgerlichen Geistes by Helmuth Plessner pages 419-420 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 32, Issue # 4, December 1960.
• Review of The German Northern Theater of Operations, 1940-1945 by Earl F. Ziemke pages 478-479 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 33, Issue # 4, December 1961.
• Review of The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg pages 694-695 from The American Historical Review, Volume 67, Issue # 3, April 1962.
• Review of Der Zweite Weltkrieg by Hellmuth Günther Dahms pages 994-995 from The American Historical Review, Volume 67, Issue # 4, June 1962.
• Review of Die Obersten Behorden der k. u. k. Kriegsmarine 1856-1918 by Walter Wagner page 142 from Military Affairs, Volume 26, Issue # 3, Autumn 1962.
• Review of Der erzwungene Krieg by David Hoggan pages 104-105 from The American Historical Review Volume 68, Issue # 1, October 1962.
• Review of Operationsgebiet Ostliche Ostsee und der Finnisch-Baltische Raum, 1944 page 366 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 34, Issue # 3, September 1962
• "Schachts Beusch in den USA im Jahre 1933" pages 166-180 from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 11, Issue #2, April 1963.
• "German Colonial Plans and Policies, 1938-1942" pages 462-491 from Geschichte und Gegenwartsbewusstsein Festschrift für Hans Rothfels, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruphrect, 1963.
• Review of Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht, 1940-1945 by Percy Ernst Schramm pages 328-329 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 35, Issue # 3, September 1963.
• Review of Der Hitle-Stalin-Pakt, 1939-1941: Ein Beitrag Zur Methode Sowjetischer Aussenpolitik by Philipp W. Fabry pages 107-108 from The American Historical Review, Volume 69, Issue # 1 October 1963.
• Review of Munich by Keith Eubank pages 763-764 from The American Historical Review, Volume 69, Issue # 3, April 1964.
• "Hitler's Image of the United States pages 1006-1021 from American Historical Review, Volume 69, Issue #4, July 1964.
• Reviews of The Early Goebbels Diaries, 1925-1926 edited by Helmut Heiber & The Struggle for Germany, 1914-1945 by Lionel Kochan pages 453-455 from Political Science Quarterly, Volume 79, Issue # 3, September 1964
• “National Socialist Organization and Foreign Policy Aims in 1927” pages 428-433 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 36, Issue # 4, December 1964.
• Review of Hitler et les Etats-Unis (1939-1941) by Saul Friedländer pages 483-484 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 36, Issue # 4, December 1964.
• Review of Big Business in the Third Reich by Arthur Schweitzer pages 439-441 from Political Science Quarterly, Volume 80, Issue # 3, September 1965.
• Review of The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich by George Mosse pages 108-109 from Political Science Quarterly, Volume 81, Issue # 1, March 1966.
• Review of Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (Wehrmachtführungsstab) by Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Andreas Hillgruber & Walther Hubatsch pages 328-330 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 38, Issue # 3 September 1966
• Review of Hitler and Russia: The Third Reich in a Two-Front War, 1937-1943 by Trumball Higgins page 965 from The American Historical Review, Volume 72, Issue # 3 April 1967.
• Review of While Berlin Burns: The Diary of Hans-Georg von Studnitz, 1943-1945 by Hans-Georg von Studnitz pages 208-209 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 39, Issue # 2, June 1967.
• Review of Germany: A Brief History by Walter Michael Simon page 413 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 40, Issue # 3, September 1968
• Review of The Trial of the Germans: An Account of the Twenty-two Defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg by Eugene Davidson pages 670-671 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 40, Issue # 4, December 1968.
• Review of Stalin, Hitler, and Europe Volume I: The Origins of World War II, 1933-1939 by James E. McSherry page 660 from Slavic Review, Volume 27, Issue # 4, December 1968.
• Review of Stauffenberg. The Architect of the Famous July 20th Conspiracy to Assassinate Hitler by Joachim Kramarz pages 669-670 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 40, Issue # 4 December 1968.
• Review of The Conspiracy Against Hitler in the Twilight War by Harold C. Deutsch pages 1027-1029 from The American Historical Review, Volume 74, Issue # 3, February 1969.
• Review of The Rise of Fascism by Francis L. Carsten pages 122-123 from Political Science Quarterly, Volume 84, Issue # 1, March 1969.
• "The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the European Balance of Power, pages 248-260 from Central European History, Volume 2, Issue 3, September 1969.
• Review of The Free City: Danzig and German Foreign Policy, 1919-1934 by Christoph M. Kimmich pages 168-169 from The American Historical Review, Volume 75, Issue # 1 October 1969.
• "Germany and Czechoslovakia 1933-1945" pages 760-769 from Czechoslovakia Past and Present edited by Miloslva Rechcigl, The Hauge: Moution, 1969.
• Review of The Arms of Krupp, 1587-1968 by William Manchester pages 420-421 from Military Affairs, Volume 33, Issue # 3, December 1969.
• Review of The End of Glory: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War II by Laurence Lafore pages 2040-2041 from The American Historical Review, Volume 75, Issue # 7, December 1970.
• Review of Deutsch-Sowjetische Beziehungen bis Rapallo by Horst Gunther Linke pages 398-399 from Slavic Review, Volume 30, Issue # 2, June 1971.
• Review of Stalin, Hitler, and Europe Volume 2: The Imbalance of Power, 1939-1941 by James E. McSherry page 668 from Slavic Review, Volume 30, Issue # 3, September 1971.
• Reviews of The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism by A. James Gregor & Fascism Today: A World Survey edited by Angelo Del Boca; Mario Giovana; R. H. Boothroyd pages 665-667 from Political Science Quarterly, Volume 86, Issue # 4, December 1971.
• Review of Die Sowjetunion und das Dritte Reich: Eine Dokumentierte Geschichte der Deutsch-Sowjetischen Beziehungen von 1933 Bis 1941 by Philipp W. Fabry pages 681-682 from Slavic Review, Volume 31, Issue # 3, September 1972.
• Review of Economic Appeasement: Handel und Finanz in der britischen Deutschland-Politik, 1933-1939 by Bernd-Jürgen Wendt pages 643-644 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 44, Issue # 4, December 1972.
• Review of Icon and Swastika: The Russian Orthodox Church under Nazi and Soviet Control by Harvey Fireside pages 135-137 from Political Science Quarterly, Volume 88, Issue # 1, March 1973.
• Review of The Czechs under Nazi Rule: The Failure of National Resistance, 1939-1942 by Vojtech Mastny pages 322-323 from Political Science Quarterly, Volume 88, Issue # 2, June 1973.
• Review of Akten zur deutschen auswartigen Politik, 1918-1945, aus dem Archiv des Auswartigen Amts. Series C: 1933-1937. Das Dritte Reich: Die ersten Jahre. Volume 1. Part 1, 30. Januar bis 15. Mai 1933; part 2, 16. Mai bis 14. Oktober 1933 pages 462-463 from The American Historical Review, Volume 78, Issue # 2, April 1973.
• Reviews of Republic to Reich: The Making of the Nazi Revolution edited by Hajo Holborn; Hitler's Weltanschauung: A Blueprint for Power by Eberhard Jäckel & Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader by Percy Ernst Schramm pages 306-307 from The American Political Science Review, Volume 68, Issue # 1, March 1974.
• Reviews of The War Hitler Won: The Fall of Poland, September 1939 by Nicholas Bethell & Codeword Barbarossa by Barton Whaley pages 361-362 from Slavic Review, Volume 33, Issue # 2, June 1974.
• Review of Hitler's Strategy, 1940-1941: The Balkan Clue by Martin van Creveld page 805 from Slavic Review, Volume 33, Issue # 4, December 1974.
• Review of Stalin und Hitler: Pakt Gegen Europa by J. W. Brügel pages 151-152 from Slavic Review, Volume 34, Issue # 1, March 1975
• Review of The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924-1941 by Sander A. Diamond pages 1140-1141 from The Journal of American History, Volume 61, Issue # 4, March 1975.
• Review of Stalingrad, Risse im Bundnis, 1942/43 by Jurgen Forster page 45 from Military Affairs, Volume 40, Issue # 1, February 1976.
• Review of Russland und Deutschland by Uwe Liszkowski pages 632-633 from The American Historical Review, Volume 81, Issue # 3, June 1976.
• Review of Friedensinitiativen und Machtpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 1939-1942 by Bernd Martin pages 740-742 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 48, Issue # 4 December 1976.
• Review of Hitler's Decision to Invade Russia, 1941 edited by Robert Cecil; Noble Frankland & Christopher Dowling pages 305-306 from Slavic Review, Volume 36, Issue # 2, June 1977.
• Review of Adolf Hitler by John Toland pages 1280-1281 from The American Historical Review, Volume 82, Issue # 5 December 1977.
• Review of Von der Strategie der Gewalt zur Politik der Friedenssicherung: Beitrage zur deutschen Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert by Hans-Adolf Jacobsen page 197 from The American Historical Review, Volume 83, Issue # 1, February 1978.
• Review of The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler by Robert G. L. Waite pages 753-756 from The American Historical Review, Volume 83, Issue # 3, June 1978.
• "Recent German History: Some Comments and Perspectives" pages 358-368 from Deutschland-Russland-Amerika: Festschrift für Fritz Epstein, Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978.
• Review of Le IIIe Reich et la pétrole roumain 1938-1940: Contribution à l'étude de la pénétration économique allemande dans les Balkans à la veille et au début de la Seconde Guerre mondiale by Philippe Marguerat pages 556-558 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 50, Issue # 3, September 1978.
• Review of Hitler's War and the Germans: Public Mood and Attitude during the Second World War by Marlis G. Steinert pages 795-797 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 50, Issue # 4, December 1978
• Review of The Decision to Divide Germany: American Foreign Policy in Transition by John H. Backer pages 1185-1186 from The Journal of American History, Volume 65, Issue # 4, March 1979
• Review of Germany and the United States: A "Special Relationship?" by Hans W. Gatzke pages 1225-1226 from The American Historical Review, Volume 85, Issue # 5 December 1980.
• Review of Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg. Volume I: Ursachen und Voraussetzungen der Deutschen Kriegsopolitik by Wilhelm Deist; Manfred Messerschmidt; Hans-Erich Volkmann; Wolfram Wette pages 732-734 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 52, Issue # 4, December 1980.
• Review of Hungary, the Great Powers, and the Danubian Crisis, 1936-1939 by Thomas L. Sakmyster page 166 from Slavic Review, Volume 41, Issue # 1, Spring 1982.
• Reviews of The Swiss Corridor: Espionage Networks in Switzerland during World War II by Jozef Garlinski & The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes by Gordon Welchman pages 91–92 from Military Affairs, Volume 47, Issue # 2, April 1983.
• Review of Germany and the Far Eastern Crisis, 1931-1938: A Study in Diplomacy and Ideology by John P. Fox page 421 from The American Historical Review, Volume 88, Issue # 2, April 1983.
• Reviews of Poland's Place in Europe: General Sikorski and the Origin of the Oder-Neisse Line, 1939-1943 by Sarah Meiklejohn Terry & The Civilian Population and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 by Joanna K. M. Hanson pages 566-568 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 56, Issue # 3, September 1984.
• Review of Germany, Russia, and the Balkans Prelude to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact by Marilyn Giroux Hitchens pages 711-712 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 56, Issue # 4 December 1984.
• Review of Das deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg by Horst Boog pages 761-762 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 56, Issue # 4, December 1984
• Review of "Unternehmen Barbarossa," der Deutsche Uberfall auf die Sowjetunion 1941: Berichte, Analysen, Dokumente by Gerd R. Ueberschar & Wolf Wette pages 727-728 from Slavic Review, Volume 44, Issue # 4, Winter 1985
• “Stages to War: Response” pages 316-320 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 57, Issue # 2, June 1985.
• Review of Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945 pages 964-965 from The American Historical Review, Volume 90, Issue # 4, October 1985.
• Review of Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg by Gerhard Schreiber; Bernd Stegemann; Detlef Vogel pages 374-376 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 58, Issue # 1, March 1986.
• Review of Eine vertane Chance: Die Stalin-Note vom 10. Marz 1952 und die Wiedervereinigung; Eine Studie auf der Grundlage unveroffentlichter britischer und amerikanischer Akten by Rolf Steininger page 1189 from The American Historical Review, Volume 91, Issue # 5, December 1986.
• Review of Zwischen Anpassung und Widerstand: Deutsche Diplomaten, 1938-1941 by Marion Thielenhaus pages 637-638 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 59, Issue # 3, September 1987.
• Review of Frankreich und die Sowjetunion 1938-1940: Ein Beitrag zur Franzosischen Ostpolitik Zwischen dem Munchener Abkommen und dem Ende der Dritten Republik by Heinrich Bartel pages 609-610 from Slavic Review, Volume 46, Issue # 3/4, Autumn - Winter 1987.
• “Hitler's Memorandum on the Four-Year Plan: A Note” pages 133-135 from German Studies Review, Volume 11, Issue # 1, February 1988.
• Review of Jugoslawien in Strategie und Politik der Alliierten 1940-1943 by Hans Knoll pages 363-364 from Slavic Review, Volume 47, Issue # 2, Summer 1988
• "Munich After 50 Years" pages 165-178 from Foreign Affairs Volume 67, Issue # 1 Fall 1988.
• Review of Hitler and the Quest for World Dominion by Geoffrey Stoakes pages 1355-1356 from The American Historical Review, Volume 93, Issue # 5, December 1988.
• Review of Die neue Alte Welt: Roosevelt, Churchill und die europaische Nachkriegsordnung by Axel Gietz pages 101-102 from The American Historical Review, Volume 94, Issue #. 1, February 1989.
• Review of Stalin's War: A Radical New Theory of the Origins of the Second World War by Ernst Topitsch pages 800-801 from The American Historical Review, Volume 94, Issue # 3, June 1989.
• Review of Das Auswartige Amt im Dritten Reich: Diplomatie im Schatten der "Endlosung" by Hans-Jurgen Doscher pages 420-422 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 61, Issue # 2 June 1989.
• “The Munich Crisis in Historical Perspective" pages 668-678 from International History Review Volume 11, Issue #4, November 1989.
• Review of German Resistance to Hitler by Peter Hoffmann pages 1419-1420 from The American Historical Review, Volume 94, Issue # 5, December 1989.
• Review of Between Churchill and Stalin: The Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the Origins of the Grand Alliance by Steven Merritt Miner pages 1168-1169 from The American Historical Review, Volume 95, Issue # 4, October 1990.
• “Hitlers Entschluß zum Krieg” pages 31–36 from 1939 An der Schwelle zum Weltkrieg. Die Entfesselung des Zweiten Weltkrieges edited by Klaus Zernack,, Jurgen Schmadeke & Klaus Hildebrand, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990 ISBN 978-3-11-012596-2.
• Review of Organisation und Mobilisierung des Deutschen Machtbereichs by Bernhard Kroener; Rolf-Dietrich Muller; Hans Umbrei pages 885-887 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 62, Issue # 4, December 1990.
• Review of Turkish Foreign Policy during the Second World War: An "Acute" Neutrality by Selim Deringil pages 923-924 from The American Historical Review, Volume 96, Issue # 3, June 1991.
• Review of Der Pakt: Hitler, Stalin und die Initiative der Deutschen Diplomatie 1938-1939 by Ingeborg Fleischhauer pages 237-238 from The American Historical Review, Volume 97, Issue # 1, February 1992.
• Reviews of Paths to War: New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War edited by Robert Boyce & Esmonde M. Robertson & How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938-1939 by Donald C. Watt pages 382-385 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 64, Issue # 2, June 1992
• “Some Thoughts on World War II” pages 659-668 from The Journal of Military History, Volume 56, Issue # 4, October 1992.
• Review of The Opening of the Second World War by David Wingate Pike page 341 from The Journal of Military History, Volume 57, Issue # 2, April 1993.
• Co-written with Edwin Bridges, Gregory Hunter, Page Putnam Miller, David Thelen “Historians and Archivists: A Rationale for Cooperation” pages 179-186 from The Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue # 1, June 1993.
• Review of Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg. Volume 6: Der Globale Krieg: Die Ausweitung zum Weltkrieg und der Wechsel der Initiative, 1941-1943 by Horst Boog; Werner Rahn; Reinhard Stumpf; Bernd Wegner pages 666-668 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 65, Issue # 3, September 1993
• “Comments on the Papers by Friedlander, Breitman, and Browning” pages 509-512 from German Studies Review, Volume 17, Issue # 3, October 1994.
• Review of The German Resistance against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad, 1938-1945 by Klemens von Klemperer pages 222-223 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 67, Issue # 1 March 1995
• Review of Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War, 1945-1990 by Richard J. B. Bosworth pages 553-554 from The Journal of Military History, Volume 59, Issue # 3, July 1995.
• Review of The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution by Henry Friedlander pages 176-179 from German Studies Review, Volume 19, Issue # 1 February 1996.
• Review of Stalin's Drive to the West: The Origins of the Cold War by R.C. Raack pages 278-279 from Central European History, Volume 29, Issue #2, 1996.
• “Changes in the Place of Women in the Historical Profession: A Personal Perspective” pages 323-327 from The History Teacher, Volume 29, Issue # 3, May 1996.
• Review of Why the Allies Won by Richard Overy pages 573-574 from The Historical Journal, Volume 39, Issue # 2, June 1996.
• “Germany’s War for World Conquest and the Extermination of the Jews” pages 119-133 from Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 10, 1996.
• Review of Cooperation under Fire: Anglo-German Restraint during World War II by Jeffrey W. Legro page 1212 from The American Historical Review, Volume 101, Issue # 4, October 1996.
• Review of Ambassador Frederic Sackett and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic, 1930- 1933: The United States and Hitler's Rise to Power by Bernard V. Burke pages 1027-1028 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 68, Issue # 4, December 1996.
• Review of The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century by Eric Markusen & David Kopf pages 89–90 from The American Historical Review, Volume 102, Issue #1, February 1997
• “World War II Scholarship, Now and in the Future” pages 335-345 from The Journal of Military History, Volume 61, Issue # 2, April 1997.
• Review of From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the World, 1939-1941 by Bernd Wegner pages 834-835 from The Journal of Military History, Volume 61, Issue # 4, October 1997.
• “Reflections on Two Unifications” pages 13–25 from German Studies Review, Volume 21, Issue # 1, February 1998.
• “Unexplored Questions about the German Military during World War II” pages 371-380 from The Journal of Military History, Volume 62, Issue # 2, April 1998.
• Review of Sideshow War: The Italian Campaign, 1943-1945 by George F. Botjer pages 550-551 from The American Historical Review, Volume 103, Issue # 2, April 1998.
• Review of Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s by Igor Lukes page 1646 from The American Historical Review, Volume 103, Issue # 5, December 1998.
• "German Plans and Policies regarding Neutral Nations in World War II with Special Reference to Switzerland" pages 99–103 from German Studies Review, Volume 22, Issue # 1, February 1999.
• Review of Armistice 1918 by Bullitt Lowry pages 221-222 from Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 1999.
• "Reflections on Munich after 60 Years" pages 1–12 from The Munich Crisis, 1938 Prelude to World War II edited by Igor Lukes and Erik Goldstein, London: Frank Cass, 1999, ISBN 0-7146-8056-7.
• Review of The Roots of Nazi Psychology: Hitler's Utopian Barbarism by Jay Y. Gonen pages 210-211 from German Studies Review, Volume 24, Issue #1, February 2001.
• Review of The Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain by Gerwin Strobl pages 820-821 from The Journal of Military History, Volume 65, Issue # 3, July 2001.
• Review of From Versailles to Pearl Harbor: The Origins of the Second World War in Europe and Asia by Margaret Lamb & Nicholas Tarling page 600 from The Journal of Military History, Volume 66, Issue # 2, April 2002.
• Review of Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941-1944 pages 440-441 from German Studies Review, Volume 26, Issue # 2, May 2003.
• Review of Disobedience and Conspiracy in the German Army, 1918-1945 by Robert B. Kane pages 980-981 from The Journal of Military History, Volume 67, Issue # 3, July 2003.
• Review of Präventivkrieg? Der deutsche Angriff auf die Sowjetunion by Bianka Pietrow-Ennker pages 864-865 from Slavic Review, Volume 61, Issue # 4 Winter 2002
• (editor & translator) Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, New York: Enigma Books, 2003 ISBN 978-1-929631-61-2.

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Food Network Challenge. (Discuss) Proposed since July 2009.

Keegan Gerhard (born December 2, 1960) is an award winning pastry chef and the former host of the Food Network series Food Network Challenge.^[1] As of the tenth season, he has been replaced by Claire Robinson. Instead of being the host, he serves as a judge alongside Kerry Vincent. Gerhard is the owner and executive chef of D-Bar Desserts in Denver, Colorado.^[2]

References[link]

This biographical article about a foodie, restaurateur or gourmand is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Rick Atkinson (born 1952, in Munich) is an American journalist and author whose contributions led to four Pulitzer Prizes.

Life[link]

Atkinson was born in Munich. His father was an United States Army officer and he grew up at military posts. He earned his bachelor degree from East Carolina University in 1974 and a master of art degree from the University of Chicago in 1976. His first reporting job was at The Morning Sun in Pittsburg, Kansas He started working at the Kansas City Times in 1977. He won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for articles including a series on the West Point Class of 1966. He also contributed^[1] to the Times overall effort which won it another Pulitzer Prize the same year for the coverage of the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse.

In 1983 he worked for The Washington Post where he covered The Pentagon and the 1984 Presidential election and was national editor for two years. He went on book leave in 1988 to finish The Long Gray Line, which he had begun reporting on in Kansas City. He returned to the Post in 1989 and was the paper's lead reporter in the 1991 Gulf War. He went on leave again to finish a book about the war Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. In 1993 he returned to the Post as its Berlin bureau covering conflicts in Bosnia and Somalia. The Post won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for public service for a series conceived by Atkinson on shootings by the District of Columbia police department.

He won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for history for his book An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943, which was followed by the second volume in what Atkinson calls his "Liberation trilogy", The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944. While at work on the third volume, he received the $100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.^[2]

Atkinson served as the Omar N. Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership [1] at the US Army War College and Dickinson College in 2004 and 2005. He was a Fall 2009 Axel Springer Berlin Prize Fellow, at the American Academy in Berlin. He is currently an advisory fellow of the Barsanti Military History Center at the University of North Texas.

Atkinson's book In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat is about the Iraq War. He was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division for two months and had extensive contact with Gen. David Petraeus.

Bibliography[link]

• The Long Gray Line. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1989. ISBN 0-395-48008-6. 
• Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1993. ISBN 0-395-60290-4. 
• An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943. New York: Henry Holt. 2002. ISBN 0-8050-6288-2. 
• In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat. New York: Henry Holt. 2004. ISBN 0-8050-7561-5. 
• The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944. New York: Henry Holt. 2007. ISBN 0-8050-6289-0. 

Notes and references[link]

External links[link]

• Rick Atkinson interview on Counterpoint Radio with Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities at the University of Memphis.
• Publisher's website for An Army at Dawn
• Pulitzer Biography in 2003
• Reviews of An Army At Dawn and The Day of Battle (Advanced Readers Copy)
• Interview on In the Company of Soldiers at the Pritzker Military Library
• Interview on The Day of Battle
• Booknotes interview with Atkinson on Army at Dawn, November 17, 2002

Benito Mussolini
220px
Head of Government of Italy and Duce of Fascism
In office 24 December 1925 – 25 July 1943
Monarch	Victor Emmanuel III
Preceded by	Himself (as Prime Minister)
Succeeded by	Pietro Badoglio (as Prime Minister)
27th Prime Minister of Italy
In office 31 October 1922 – 25 July 1943
Monarch	Victor Emmanuel III
Preceded by	Luigi Facta
Succeeded by	Pietro Badoglio
First Marshal of the Empire
In office 30 March 1938 – 25 July 1943 Serving with Victor Emmanuel III
Head of State of the Italian Social Republic
In office 23 September 1943 – 25 April 1945
Personal details
Born	(1883-07-29)29 July 1883 Predappio, Forlì, Kingdom of Italy
Died	28 April 1945(1945-04-28) (aged 61) Giulino di Mezzegra, Kingdom of Italy
Resting place	San Cassiano cemetery, Predappio, Forlì, Italian Republic
Nationality	Italian
Political party	Republican Fascist Party (1943–1945) National Fascist Party (1921–1943) Italian Fasci of Combat (1919–1921) Fasci of Revolutionary Action (1914–1919) Italian Socialist Party (1901–1914)
Spouse(s)	Rachele Mussolini
Relations	Ida Dalser Margherita Sarfatti Clara Petacci
Children	Edda Mussolini Vittorio Mussolini Bruno Mussolini Romano Mussolini Anna Maria Mussolini
Profession	Politician, journalist, novelist, teacher
Religion	(See this section for details.)
Signature
Military service
Allegiance	Kingdom of Italy
Service/branch	Regio Esercito
Years of service	1915–1917
Rank	Corporal
Unit	11th Bersaglieri Regiment
Battles/wars	World War I

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (Italian pronunciation: [beˈniːto musːoˈliːni]; 29 July 1883 – 28 April 1945) was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party, ruling the country from 1922 to his ousting in 1943, and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of fascism.

Originally a member of the Italian Socialist Party and editor of the Avanti! from 1912 to 1914, Mussolini fought in World War I as an ardent nationalist and created the Fasci di Combattimento in 1919, catalyzing his nationalist and socialist beliefs in the Fascist Manifesto, published in 1921. Following the March on Rome in October 1922 he became the 27th Prime Minister of Italy and began using the title Il Duce by 1925, about which time he had established dictatorial authority by both legal and extraordinary means, aspiring to create a totalitarian state. After 1936, his official title was Sua Eccellenza Benito Mussolini, Capo del Governo, Duce del Fascismo e Fondatore dell'Impero ("His Excellency Benito Mussolini, Head of Government, Duce of Fascism, and Founder of the Empire")^[1] Mussolini also created and held the supreme military rank of First Marshal of the Empire along with King Victor Emmanuel III, which gave him and the King joint supreme control over the military of Italy. Mussolini remained in power until he was replaced in 1943; for a short period after this until his death, he was the leader of the Italian Social Republic.

Mussolini was among the founders of Italian Fascism, which included elements of nationalism, corporatism, national syndicalism, expansionism, social progress, and anti-socialism in combination with censorship of subversives and state propaganda. In the years following his creation of the Fascist ideology, Mussolini influenced, or achieved admiration from, a wide variety of political figures.^[2]

Among the domestic achievements of Mussolini from the years 1924–1939 were: his public works programs such as the taming of the Pontine Marshes, the improvement of job opportunities, the public transport, and the so-called Italian economic battles. Mussolini also solved the Roman Question by concluding the Lateran Treaty between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See. Mussolini and the Fascist regime initiated an aggressive campaign to destroy the Sicilian mafia with mass arrests and mass trials of mafiosi.^[3] Mussolini was unable to purge Sicily of the mafia, because the mafia utilized its strong base of supporters to hide and protect itself as an underground movement during Fascist rule in Italy.^[4]

On 10 June 1940, Mussolini led Italy into World War II, ultimately siding with Germany. Mussolini was aware that Italy did not have the military capacity to carry out a long war with France and the United Kingdom.^[5] Therefore, he waited until the former was on the verge of imminent collapse and surrender because of the German invasion before declaring war on France and the UK, on the assumption that - following France's collapse - the war would be short-lived and peace negotiations would soon take place.^[6] Mussolini believed that after the imminent French surrender, Italy could gain from this country some territorial concessions and then concentrate its forces on a major offensive in Egypt where British and Commonwealth forces were outnumbered by Italian forces.^[7] However the UK refused to accept German proposals for a peace that would involve accepting Germany's victories in Eastern and Western Europe, plans for a German invasion of the UK did not proceed, and the war continued.

On 24 July 1943, soon after the start of the Allied invasion of Italy, through the Ordine del giorno Grandi Mussolini was defeated in the vote at the Grand Council of Fascism, and the day after the King had him arrested. On 12 September 1943, Mussolini was rescued from prison in the daring Gran Sasso raid by German special forces. Following his rescue, Mussolini headed the Italian Social Republic in parts of Italy that were not occupied by Allied forces. In late April 1945, with total defeat looming, Mussolini attempted to escape north,^[8] only to be quickly captured and summarily executed near Lake Como by Italian partisans. His body was then taken to Milan where it was hung upside down at a petrol station for public viewing and to provide confirmation of his demise.^[9]

Early life[link]

Birthplace of Benito Mussolini, today used as a museum.
44°06′22″N 11°58′50″E / 44.10613°N 11.980451°E / 44.10613; 11.980451 (Birthplace of Benito Mussolini)

Mussolini was born in Dovia di Predappio, a small town in the province of Forlì in Emilia-Romagna on 29 July 1883. In the Fascist era, Predappio was dubbed "Duce's town", and Forlì was "Duce's city". Pilgrims went to Predappio and Forlì, to see the birthplace of Mussolini. His father Alessandro Mussolini was a blacksmith and a socialist,^[10] while his mother Rosa Mussolini, née Maltoni, a devoutly Catholic schoolteacher.^[11] Owing to his father's political leanings, Mussolini was named Benito after Mexican reformist President Benito Juárez, while his middle names Andrea and Amilcare were from Italian socialists Andrea Costa and Amilcare Cipriani.^[12] Benito was the eldest of his parents' three children. His siblings Arnaldo and Edvige followed.^[13]

As a young boy, Mussolini would spend time helping his father in his smithy.^{[citation needed]} Mussolini's early political views were heavily influenced by his father, Alessandro Mussolini, a revolutionary socialist who idolized 19th century Italian nationalist figures with humanist tendencies such as Carlo Pisacane, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Giuseppe Garibaldi.^[14] His father's political outlook combined views of anarchist figures like Carlo Cafiero and Mikhail Bakunin, the military authoritarianism of Garibaldi, and the nationalism of Mazzini. ^[15] In 1902, at the anniversary of Garibaldi's death, Benito Mussolini made a public speech in praise of the republican nationalist. ^[15] The conflict between his parents about religion meant that, unlike most Italians, Mussolini was not baptised at birth and would not be until much later in life. As a compromise with his mother, Mussolini was sent to a boarding school run by Salesian monks. Mussolini was rebellious and was soon expelled after a series of behaviour related incidents, including throwing stones at the congregation after Mass, stabbing a fellow student in the hand and throwing an inkpot at a teacher.^{[citation needed]} After joining a new school, Mussolini achieved good grades, and qualified as an elementary schoolmaster in 1901.^[11]

Emigration to Switzerland and military service[link]

Mussolini's booking photograph following his arrest by Swiss police, 1903.

In 1902, Mussolini emigrated to Switzerland, partly to avoid military service.^[10] He worked briefly as a stonemason in Geneva, Fribourg and Bern, but was unable to find a permanent job.

During this time he studied the ideas of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, and the syndicalist Georges Sorel. Mussolini also later credited the Marxist Charles Péguy and the syndicalist Hubert Lagardelle as some of his influences.^[16] Sorel's emphasis on the need for overthrowing decadent liberal democracy and capitalism by the use of violence, direct action, the general strike, and the use of neo-Machiavellian appeals to emotion, impressed Mussolini deeply.^[10]

Mussolini became active in the Italian socialist movement in Switzerland, working for the paper L'Avvenire del Lavoratore, organizing meetings, giving speeches to workers and serving as secretary of the Italian workers' union in Lausanne.^[17] In 1903, he was arrested by the Bernese police because of his advocacy of a violent general strike, spent two weeks in jail, was deported to Italy, set free there, and returned to Switzerland.^[18] In 1904, after having been arrested again in Lausanne for falsifying his papers, he returned to Italy to take advantage of an amnesty for desertion of which he had been convicted in absentia.^[17]

He subsequently volunteered for military service in the Italian Army. After serving for two years in the military (from January 1905 until September 1906), he returned to teaching.^[19]

Political journalist and socialist[link]

In February 1908, Mussolini once again left Italy, this time to take the job as the secretary of the labor party in the Italian-speaking city of Trento, which at the time was under control of Austria-Hungary. He also did office work for the local Socialist Party, and edited its newspaper L'Avvenire del Lavoratore (The Future of the Worker). Returning to Italy, he spent a brief time in Milan, and then in 1910 he returned to his hometown of Forli, where he edited the weekly Lotta di classe (The Class Struggle).

During this time, he published Il Trentino veduto da un Socialista (Trentino as seen by a Socialist) in the radical periodical La Voce.^[20] He also wrote several essays about German literature, some stories, and one novel: L'amante del Cardinale: Claudia Particella, romanzo storico (The Cardinal's Mistress). This novel he co-wrote with Santi Corvaja, and was published as a serial book in the Trento newspaper Il Popolo. It was released in installments from 20 January to 11 May 1910^[21] The novel was bitterly anticlerical, and years later was withdrawn from circulation after Mussolini made a truce with the Vatican.^[10]

By now, he was considered to be one of Italy's most prominent Socialists. In September 1911, Mussolini participated in a riot, led by Socialists, against the Italian war in Libya. He bitterly denounced Italy's "imperialist war" to capture the Libyan capital city of Tripoli, an action that earned him a five-month jail term.^[22] After his release he helped expel from the ranks of the Socialist party two "revisionists" who had supported the war, Ivanoe Bonomi, and Leonida Bissolati. As a result, he was rewarded the editorship of the Socialist Party newspaper Avanti! Under his leadership, its circulation soon rose from 20,000 to 100,000.^[23]

In 1913, he published Giovanni Hus, il veridico (Jan Hus, true prophet), an historical and political biography about the life and mission of the Czech ecclesiastic reformer Jan Hus, and his militant followers, the Hussites. During this socialist period of his life Mussolini sometimes used the pen name "Vero Eretico" (sincere misbeliever).

While Mussolini was associated with socialism, he also was supportive of figures who opposed egalitarianism. For instance Mussolini was influenced by Nietszche's anti-Christian ideas and negation of God's existence.^[24] Mussolini saw Nietzsche as similar to Jean-Marie Guyau, who advocated a philosophy of action. ^[24] Mussolini's use of Nietzsche made him a highly unorthodox socialist, due to Nietzsche's promotion of elitism and anti-egalitarian views. ^[24] Mussolini felt that socialism had faltered due to the failures of Marxist determinism and social democratic reformism, and believed that Nietzsche's ideas would strengthen socialism. ^[24] While associated with socialism, Mussolini's writings eventually indicated that he had abandoned Marxism and egalitarianism in favour of Nietzsche's übermensch concept and anti-egalitarianism. ^[24]

Expulsion from the Italian Socialist Party[link]

With the outbreak of World War I a number of socialist parties initially supported the war when it began in August 1914.^[25] Once the war began, Austrian, British, French, German, and Russian socialists followed the rising nationalist current by supporting their country's intervention in the war. ^[26] The outbreak of the war had resulted in a surge of Italian nationalism and the war supported by a variety of political factions. One of the most prominent and popular Italian nationalist supporters of the war was Gabriele d'Annunzio who promoted Italian irredentism and helped sway the Italian public to support intervention in the war. ^[27] The Italian Liberal Party under the leadership of Paolo Boselli promoted intervention in the war on the side of the Allies and utilized the Società Dante Alighieri to promote Italian nationalism. ^{[28] [29]} Italian socialists were divided on whether to support the war or oppose it. ^[30] Prior to Mussolini taking a position on the war, a number of revolutionary syndicalists had announced their support of intervention, including Alceste De Ambris, Filippo Corridoni, and Angelo Oliviero Olivetti. ^[31] The Italian Socialist Party decided to oppose the war after anti-militarist protestors had been killed, resulting in a general strike called Red Week. ^[32]

Mussolini initially held official support for the party's decision and, in an August 1914 article, Mussolini wrote "Down with the War. We remain neutral."^[33] However, he saw the war as an opportunity, both for his own ambitions as well as those of socialists and Italians.^[33] He was influenced by anti-Austrian Italian nationalist sentiments, believing that the war offered Italians in Austria-Hungary the chance to liberate themselves from rule of the Habsburgs.^[33] He eventually decided to declare support for the war by appealing to the need for socialists to overthrow the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies in Germany and Austria-Hungary whom he claimed had consistently repressed socialism.^[33] He further justified his position by denouncing the Central Powers for being reactionary powers; for pursuing imperialist designs against Belgium and Serbia as well as historically against Denmark, France, and against Italians, since hundreds of thousands of Italians were under Habsburg rule. ^[31] He claimed that the fall of Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies and the repression of "reactionary" Turkey would create conditions beneficial for the working class. ^[31] While he was supportive of the Entente powers, Mussolini responded to the conservative nature of Tsarist Russia by claiming that the mobilization required for the war would undermine Russia's reactionary authoritarianism and the war would bring Russia to social revolution. ^[31] He claimed that for Italy the war would complete the process of Risorgimento by uniting the Italians in Austria-Hungary into Italy and by allowing the common people of Italy to be participating members of the Italian nation in what would be Italy's first national war. ^[31] Thus he claimed that the vast social changes that the war could offer meant that it should be supported as a revolutionary war. ^[31]

As Mussolini's support for the intervention solidified, he became in conflict with socialists who opposed the war. He attacked the opponents of the war and claimed that those proletarians who supported pacifism were out of step with the proletarians who had joined the rising interventionist vanguard that was preparing Italy for a revolutionary war. ^[34] He began to criticize the Italian Socialist Party and socialism itself for having failed to recognize the national problems that had led to the outbreak of the war. ^[34] He was expelled from the party due to his support of intervention.

The following excerpts are from a police report prepared by the Inspector-General of Public Security in Milan, G. Gasti, that describe his background and his position on the First World War that resulted in his ouster from the Italian Socialist Party.

The Inspector General wrote:

Regarding Mussolini

Professor Benito Mussolini, ... 38, revolutionary socialist, has a police record; elementary school teacher qualified to teach in secondary schools; former first secretary of the Chambers in Cesena, Forli, and Ravenna; after 1912 editor of the newspaper Avanti! to which he gave a violent suggestive and intransigent orientation. In October 1914, finding himself in opposition to the directorate of the Italian Socialist party because he advocated a kind of active neutrality on the part of Italy in the War of the Nations against the party's tendency of absolute neutrality, he withdrew on the twentieth of that month from the directorate of Avanti! Then on the fifteenth of November [1914], thereafter, he initiated publication of the newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia, in which he supported – in sharp contrast to Avanti! and amid bitter polemics against that newspaper and its chief backers – the thesis of Italian intervention in the war against the militarism of the Central Empires. For this reason he was accused of moral and political unworthiness and the party thereupon decided to expel him... Thereafter he ... undertook a very active campaign in behalf of Italian intervention, participating in demonstrations in the piazzas and writing quite violent articles in Popolo d'Italia...^[23]

In his summary, the Inspector also notes:

He was the ideal editor of Avanti! for the Socialists. In that line of work he was greatly esteemed and beloved. Some of his former comrades and admirers still confess that there was no one who understood better how to interpret the spirit of the proletariat and there was no one who did not observe his apostasy with sorrow. This came about not for reasons of self-interest or money. He was a sincere and passionate advocate, first of vigilant and armed neutrality, and later of war; and he did not believe that he was compromising with his personal and political honesty by making use of every means – no matter where they came from or wherever he might obtain them – to pay for his newspaper, his program and his line of action. This was his initial line. It is difficult to say to what extent his socialist convictions (which he never either openly or privately abjure) may have been sacrificed in the course of the indispensable financial deals which were necessary for the continuation of the struggle in which he was engaged... But assuming these modifications did take place ... he always wanted to give the appearance of still being a socialist, and he fooled himself into thinking that this was the case.^[35]

Beginning of Fascism and service in World War I[link]

After being ousted by the Italian Socialist Party for his support of Italian intervention, Mussolini made a radical transformation, ending his support for class conflict and joining in support of revolutionary nationalism transcending class lines. ^[34] He formed the interventionist newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia and the Fasci Rivoluzionari d'Azione Internazionalista ("Revolutionary Fasci for International Action") in October 1914. ^[29] His nationalist support of intervention enabled him to raise funds from Ansaldo (an armaments firm) and other companies to create Il Popolo d'Italia to convince socialists and revolutionaries to support the war.^[36] Further funding for Mussolini's Fascists during the war came from the French sources beginning in May 1915. ^[37] A major source of this funding from France is believed to have probably been from French socialists who sent support to dissident socialists who wanted Italian intervention on France's side. ^[37]

On 5 December 1914, Mussolini denounced orthodox socialism for having failed to recognize that the war had brought about national identity and loyalty as being of greater significance than class distinction. ^[34] His transformation was fully demonstrated in a speech he made in which he acknowledged the nation as an entity, a notion that he had previously rejected prior to the war, saying:

The nation has not disappeared. We used to believe that the concept was totally without substance. Instead we see the nation arise as a palpitating reality before us! ... Class cannot destroy the nation. Class reveals itself as a collection of interests—but the nation is a history of sentiments, traditions, language, culture, and race. Class can become an integral part of the nation, but the one cannot eclipse the other. ^[38]

The class struggle is a vain formula, without effect and consequence wherever one finds a people that has not integrated itself into its proper linguistic and racial confines—where the national problem has not been definitely resolved. In such circumstances the class movement finds itself impaired by an inauspicious historic climate. ^[39]

Mussolini continued to promote the need of a revolutionary vanguard elite to lead society, but he no longer advocated a proletarian vanguard but instead a vanguard led by dynamic and revolutionary people of any social class. ^[39]

Though he denounced orthodox socialism and class conflict, he maintained at the time that he was a nationalist socialist and a supporter of the legacy of nationalist socialists in Italy's history, such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Carlo Pisacane. ^[40] As for the Italian Socialist Party and its support of orthodox socialism, he claimed that his failure as a member of the party to revitalize and transform it to recognize the contemporary reality revealed the hopelessness of orthodox socialism as outdated and a failure. ^[40] This perception of the failure of orthodox socialism in the light of the outbreak of World War I was not solely held by Mussolini, other pro-interventionist Italian socialists such as Filippo Corridoni and Sergio Panunzio had also denounced classical Marxism in favour of intervention. ^[41]

These basic political views and principles formed the basis of Mussolini's newly formed political movement, the Fasci Rivoluzionari d'Azione Internazionalista in 1914, who called themselves Fascisti (Fascists). ^[42] At this time, the Fascists did not have an integrated set of policies and the movement was very small, ineffective in its attempts to hold mass meetings, and was regularly harassed by government authorities and orthodox socialists. ^[43] Antagonism between the interventionists, including the Fascists, versus the anti-interventionist orthodox socialists resulted in violence between the Fascists and socialists. ^[44] The opposition and attacks by the anti-interventionist revolutionary socialists against the Fascists and other interventionists were so violent that even democratic socialists who opposed the war such as Anna Kuliscioff said that the Italian Socialist Party had gone too far in a campaign of silencing the freedom of speech of supporters of the war. ^[44] These early hostilities between the Fascists and the revolutionary socialists shaped Mussolini's conception of the nature of Fascism in its support of political violence. ^[44]

Mussolini as an Italian soldier, 1917.

Mussolini became an ally with the irredentist politician and journalist Cesare Battisti, and like him he entered the Army and served in the war. "He was sent to the zone of operations where he was seriously injured by the explosion of a grenade."^[23]

The Inspector General continues:

He was promoted to the rank of corporal "for merit in war". The promotion was recommended because of his exemplary conduct and fighting quality, his mental calmness and lack of concern for discomfort, his zeal and regularity in carrying out his assignments, where he was always first in every task involving labor and fortitude.^[23]

Mussolini's military experience is told in his work Diario Di Guerra. Overall, he totalled about nine months of active, front-line trench warfare. During this time, he contracted paratyphoid fever.^[45] His military exploits ended in 1917 when he was wounded accidentally by the explosion of a mortar bomb in his trench. He was left with at least 40 shards of metal in his body^[45] He was discharged from the hospital in August 1917 and resumed his editor-in-chief position at his new paper, Il Popolo d'Italia. He wrote there positive articles about Czechoslovak Legions in Italy.

On 25 December 1915, in Trevalglio, he contracted a marriage with his fellow countrywoman Rachele Guidi, who had already born him a daughter, Edda, at Forli in 1910. In 1915, he had a son with Ida Dalser, a woman born in Sopramonte, a village near Trento.^[11][12][46] He legally recognized this son on 11 January 1916.

Creation of Fascism[link]

By the time Mussolini returned from Allied service in World War I, he had decided that socialism as a doctrine had largely been a failure. In 1917, Mussolini got his start in politics with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5, the British Security Service; this help was authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare.^[47] In early 1918, Mussolini called for the emergence of a man "ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep" to revive the Italian nation.^[48] Much later in life Mussolini said he felt by 1919 "Socialism as a doctrine was already dead; it continued to exist only as a grudge".^[49] On 23 March 1919, Mussolini reformed the Milan fascio as the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Squad), consisting of 200 members.^[50]

Fascist Manifesto published on "Il Popolo d'Italia" on June 6, 1919.

An important factor in fascism gaining support in its earliest stages was the fact that it claimed to oppose discrimination based on social class and was strongly opposed to all forms of class war.^[51][52] Fascism instead supported nationalist sentiments such as a strong unity, regardless of class, in the hopes of raising Italy up to the levels of its great Roman past. The ideological basis for fascism came from a number of sources. Mussolini utilized works of Plato, Georges Sorel, Nietzsche, and the socialist and economic ideas of Vilfredo Pareto, to create fascism. Mussolini admired The Republic, which he often read for inspiration.^[53] The Republic held a number of ideas that fascism promoted such as rule by an elite promoting the state as the ultimate end, opposition to democracy, protecting the class system and promoting class collaboration, rejection of egalitarianism, promoting the militarization of a nation by creating a class of warriors, demanding that citizens perform civic duties in the interest of the state, and utilizing state intervention in education to promote the creation of warriors and future rulers of the state.^[54] The Republic differed from fascism in that it did not promote aggressive war but only defensive war, unlike fascism it promoted very communist-like views on property, and Plato was an idealist focused on achieving justice and morality while Mussolini and fascism were realist, focused on achieving political goals.^[55]

The basic underlying idea behind Mussolini’s foreign policy was that of spazio vitale (vital space), a concept in Fascism that was analogous to lebensraum in German National Socialism.^[56] The concept of spazio vitale was first announced in 1919 when the entire Mediterranean was claimed as Italy’s exclusive sphere of influence, which was justified under the grounds that Italy was suffering from overpopulation, and so needed to colonize other areas of the Mediterranean inhabited by what were alleged to be less developed peoples. ^[57] Borrowing the idea first developed by Enrico Corradini before 1914 of the natural conflict between "plutocratic" nations like Britain and "proletarian" nations like Italy, Mussolini claimed that Italy's principle problem was that it was "plutocratic" countries like Britain that were blocking Italy from achieving the necessary spazio vitale that would let the Italian economy grow. ^[58] Mussolini equated a nation’s potential for economic growth with territorial size, thus in his view the problem of poverty in Italy could only be solved by winning the necessary spazio vitale. ^[59] Through biological racism was less prominent in Fascism than National Socialism, right from the start there was a strong racist undercurrent to the spazio vitale concept, in which Mussolini asserted there was a “natural law” for stronger peoples to subject and dominate “inferior” peoples such as the “barbaric” Slavic peoples of Yugoslavia as Mussolini claimed in a September 1920 speech. ^[60] In the same way, Mussolini argued that Italy was right to follow an imperalist policy in Africa because all black people were "inferior" to whites. ^[60] Mussolini claimed that the world was divided into a hierarchy of races (stirpe), through this was justified more on cultural than on biological grounds, and that history was nothing more than a Darwinian struggle for power and territory between various "racial masses".^[60] The very fact that Italy was suffering from overpopulation was seen as proving the cultural and spirtual vitality of the Italians, who were thus justified in seeking to colonize lands that Mussolini argued on a historical basis belonged to Italy anyway, which was the heir to the Roman Empire. ^[60] In Mussolini's thinking, demography was destiny; nations with rising populations were nations destined to conquer, and nations with falling populations were decaying powers that deserved to die. ^[60] Hence, the importance of natalism to Mussolini, since only by increasing the Italian birth rate could Italy's future as a great power that would win its spazio vitale be assured. ^[60] For Mussolini, the Italian population had to reach 60 million in order to enable Italy to fight a major war, and hence his relentless demands for Italian women to have more children to reach the magic number of 60 million. ^[60]

Mussolini and the fascists managed to be simultaneously revolutionary and traditionalist;^[61][62] because this was vastly different to anything else in the political climate of the time, it is sometimes described as "The Third Way".^[63] The Fascisti, led by one of Mussolini's close confidants, Dino Grandi, formed armed squads of war veterans called Blackshirts (or squadristi) with the goal of restoring order to the streets of Italy with a strong hand. The blackshirts clashed with communists, socialists, and anarchists at parades and demonstrations; all of these factions were also involved in clashes against each other. The government rarely interfered with the blackshirts' actions, owing in part to a looming threat and widespread fear of a communist revolution. The Fascisti grew so rapidly that within two years, it transformed itself into the National Fascist Party at a congress in Rome. Also in 1921, Mussolini was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the first time.^[12] In the meantime, from about 1911 until 1938, Mussolini had various affairs with the Jewish author and academic Margherita Sarfatti, called the "Jewish Mother of Fascism" at the time.^[64]

March on Rome and early years in power[link]

The March on Rome was a coup d'état by which Mussolini's National Fascist Party came to power in Italy and ousted Prime Minister Luigi Facta. The "march" took place in 1922 between 27–29 October. On 28 October King Victor Emmanuel III who according to the Statuto Albertino had both the executive and the Supreme military power, refused Facta's request to declare martial law, which led to Facta's resignation. The King then handed over power to Mussolini by inviting him to form a new government. Mussolini was supported by the military, the business class, and the liberal right-wing.

Italia Irredenta: regions considered Italian because of ethnic, geographic and/or historical reasons, claimed by the Fascists in the 1930s: green: Nice, Ticino, and Dalmatia; red: Malta; violet: Corsica; Savoy and Corfu were later claimed.

Mussolini and Fascist Blackshirts during the March on Rome in 1922.

As Prime Minister, the first years of Mussolini's rule were characterized by a right-wing coalition government composed of Fascists, nationalists, liberals, and two Catholic clerics from the Popular Party. The Fascists made up a small minority in his original governments. Mussolini's domestic goal was the eventual establishment of a totalitarian state with himself as supreme leader (Il Duce) a message that was articulated by the Fascist newspaper Il Popolo, which was now edited by Mussolini's brother, Arnaldo. To that end, Mussolini obtained from the legislature dictatorial powers for one year (legal under the Italian constitution of the time). He favored the complete restoration of state authority, with the integration of the Fasci di Combattimento into the armed forces (the foundation in January 1923 of the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale) and the progressive identification of the party with the state. In political and social economy, he passed legislation that favored the wealthy industrial and agrarian classes (privatisations, liberalisations of rent laws and dismantlement of the unions).^[12]

In 1923, Mussolini sent Italian forces to invade Corfu during the "Corfu Incident." In the end, the League of Nations proved powerless and Greece was forced to comply with Italian demands. Writing of Mussolini's foreign policy, the American historian Gerhard Weinberg stated:

"If the new regime Benito Mussolini installed in 1922 on the ruins of the old glorified war as a sign of vitality and repudiated pacifism as a form of decay, the lesson drawn from the terrible battles against Austria on the Isonzo river-in which the Italians fought far better than popular imagination often allows-was that the tremendous material and technical preparations needed for modern war were simply beyond the contemporary capacity of the country. This was almost certainly a correct perception, but, given the ideology of Fascism with its emphasis on the moral benefits of war, it did not lead to the conclusion that an Italy without a big stick had best speak very, very softly. On the contrary, the new regime drew the opposite conclusion. Noisy eloquence and rabid journalism might be substitued for serious preparations for war, a procedure that was harmless enough if no one took any of it seriously, but a certain road to disaster once some outside and Mussolini inside the country came to believe that the "eight million bayonets" of the Duce's imagination actually existed."^[65]

Acerbo Law[link]

In June 1923, the government passed the Acerbo Law, which transformed Italy into a single national constituency. It also granted a two-thirds majority of the seats in Parliament to the party or group of parties which had obtained at least 25% of the votes.^{[citation needed]} This law was applied in the elections of 6 April 1924. The "national alliance", consisting of Fascists, most of the old Liberals and others, won 64% of the vote largely by means of violence and voter intimidation.^{[citation needed]} These tactics were especially prevalent in the south.

Squadristi violence[link]

Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti was murdered a few days after he openly denounced Fascist violence during the 1924 elections.

The assassination of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who had requested the annulment of the elections because of the irregularities committed,^[66] provoked a momentary crisis of the Mussolini government. The murderer, a squadrista named Amerigo Dumini, reported to Mussolini soon after the murder.^{[citation needed]} Mussolini ordered a cover-up, but witnesses saw the car used to transport Matteotti's body parked outside Matteotti's residence, which linked Dumini to the murder. The Matteotti crisis provoked cries for justice against the murder of an outspoken critic of Fascist violence.^{[citation needed]}

Mussolini later confessed that a few resolute men could have altered public opinion and started a coup that would have swept fascism away. Dumini was imprisoned for two years. On his release Dumini allegedly told other people that Mussolini was responsible, for which he served further prison time. For the next 15 years, Dumini received an income from Mussolini, the Fascist Party, and other sources.^{[citation needed]}

The opposition parties responded weakly or were generally unresponsive. Many of the socialists, liberals, and moderates boycotted Parliament in the Aventine Secession, hoping to force Victor Emmanuel to dismiss Mussolini. Despite the leadership of communists such as Antonio Gramsci, socialists such as Pietro Nenni, and liberals such as Piero Gobetti and Giovanni Amendola, a mass antifascist movement never crystallized.^{[citation needed]} The king, fearful of violence from the Fascist squadristi, kept Mussolini in office.^{[citation needed]} Because of the boycott of Parliament, Mussolini could pass any legislation unopposed. The political violence of the squadristi had worked, for there was no popular demonstration against the murder of Matteotti. Within his own party, Mussolini faced doubts and dissension during these critical weeks.^{[citation needed]}

On 31 December 1924, MVSN consuls met with Mussolini and gave him an ultimatum—crush the opposition or they would do so without him. Fearing a revolt by his own militants, Mussolini decided to drop all trappings of democracy.^[67] On 3 January 1925, Mussolini made a truculent speech before the Chamber in which he took responsibility for squadristi violence (though he did not mention the assassination of Matteotti).^{[citation needed]}

He promised a crackdown on dissenters. Before his speech, MVSN detachments beat up the opposition and prevented opposition newspapers from publishing. Mussolini correctly predicted that as soon as public opinion saw him firmly in control the "fence-sitters", the silent majority, and the "place-hunters" would all place themselves behind him.^{[citation needed]}

Building a dictatorship[link]

Assassination attempts[link]

Mussolini's influence in propaganda was such that he had surprisingly little opposition to suppress. Nonetheless, he was "slightly wounded in the nose" when he was shot on 7 April 1926 by Violet Gibson, an Irish woman and daughter of Baron Ashbourne, who was subsequently deported after her arrest.^[68] On 31 October 1926, 15-year-old Anteo Zamboni attempted to shoot Mussolini in Bologna. Zamboni was lynched on the spot.^[69][70] Mussolini also survived a failed assassination attempt in Rome by anarchist Gino Lucetti,^[71] and a planned attempt by the Italian anarchist Michele Schirru,^[72] which ended with Schirru's capture and execution.^[73]

Police state[link]

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At various times after 1922, Mussolini personally took over the ministries of the interior, foreign affairs, colonies, corporations, defense, and public works. Sometimes he held as many as seven departments simultaneously, as well as the premiership. He was also head of the all-powerful Fascist Party and the armed local fascist militia, the MVSN or "Blackshirts", who terrorised incipient resistances in the cities and provinces. He would later form the OVRA, an institutionalised secret police that carried official state support. In this way he succeeded in keeping power in his own hands and preventing the emergence of any rival.

Between 1925 and 1927, Mussolini progressively dismantled virtually all constitutional and conventional restraints on his power, thereby building a police state. A law passed on Christmas Eve 1925 changed Mussolini's formal title from "president of the Council of Ministers" to "head of the government". He was no longer responsible to Parliament and could only be removed by the king. While the Italian constitution stated that ministers were only responsible to the sovereign, in practice it had become all but impossible to govern against the express will of Parliament. The Christmas Eve law ended this practice, and also made Mussolini the only person competent to determine the body's agenda. Local autonomy was abolished, and podestàs appointed by the Italian Senate replaced elected mayors and councils.

All other parties were outlawed following Zamboni's assassination attempt in 1926, though in practice Italy had been a one-party state since Mussolini's 1925 speech. In the same year, an electoral law abolished parliamentary elections. Instead, the Grand Council of Fascism selected a single list of candidates to be approved by plebiscite. The Grand Council had been created five years earlier as a party body but was "constitutionalised" and became the highest constitutional authority in the state. On paper, the Grand Council had the power to recommend Mussolini's removal from office, and was thus theoretically the only check on his power. Only Mussolini could summon the Grand Council and determine its agenda. To gain control of the South, especially Sicily, he appointed Cesare Mori as a Prefect of the city of Palermo, with the charge of eradicating the Mafia at any price. In the telegram, Mussolini wrote to Mori:

"Your Excellency has carte blanche; the authority of the State must absolutely, I repeat absolutely, be re-established in Sicily. If the laws still in force hinder you, this will be no problem, as we will draw up new laws."^[74]

He did not hesitate laying siege to towns, using torture, and holding women and children as hostages to oblige suspects to give themselves up. These harsh methods earned him the nickname of "Iron Prefect". In 1927 Mori's inquiries brought evidence of collusion between the Mafia and the Fascist establishment, and he was dismissed for length of service in 1929, at which time the number of murders in the Palermo Province had decreased from some 200 to 23. Mussolini nominated Mori as a senator, and fascist propaganda claimed that the Mafia had been defeated.^{[75][citation needed]}

Economic policy[link]

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The inauguration of Littoria in 1932.

Mussolini launched several public construction programs and government initiatives throughout Italy to combat economic setbacks or unemployment levels. His earliest, and one of the best known, was the "Battle for Wheat", by which 5,000 new farms were established and five new agricultural towns (among them Littoria and Sabaudia) on land reclaimed by draining the Pontine Marshes. In Sardinia, a model agricultural town was founded and named Mussolinia, but has long since been renamed Arborea. This town was the first of what Mussolini hoped would have been thousands of new agricultural settlements across the country. The Battle for Wheat diverted valuable resources to wheat production away from other more economically viable crops. Landowners grew wheat on unsuitable soil using all the advances of modern science, and although the wheat harvest increased, prices rose, consumption fell and high tariffs were imposed.^[76] The tariffs promoted widespread inefficiencies and the government subsidies given to farmers pushed the country further into debt.

Mussolini also initiated the "Battle for Land", a policy based on land reclamation outlined in 1928. The initiative had a mixed success; while projects such as the draining of the Pontine Marsh in 1935 for agriculture were good for propaganda purposes, provided work for the unemployed and allowed for great land owners to control subsidies, other areas in the Battle for Land were not very successful. This program was inconsistent with the Battle for Wheat (small plots of land were inappropriately allocated for large-scale wheat production), and the Pontine Marsh was lost during World War II. Fewer than 10,000 peasants resettled on the redistributed land, and peasant poverty remained high. The Battle for Land initiative was abandoned in 1940.

He also combated an economic recession by introducing the "Gold for the Fatherland" initiative, by encouraging the public to voluntarily donate gold jewellery such as necklaces and wedding rings to government officials in exchange for steel wristbands bearing the words "Gold for the Fatherland". Even Rachele Mussolini donated her own wedding ring. The collected gold was then melted down and turned into gold bars, which were then distributed to the national banks.

Mussolini pushed for government control of business: by 1935, Mussolini claimed that three quarters of Italian businesses were under state control. That same year, he issued several edicts to further control the economy, including forcing all banks, businesses, and private citizens to give up all their foreign-issued stocks and bonds to the Bank of Italy. In 1938, he also instituted wage and price controls.^{[77][citation needed]} He also attempted to turn Italy into a self-sufficient autarky, instituting high barriers on trade with most countries except Germany.

In 1943 he proposed the theory of economic socialization.

Government[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Mussolini's foremost priority was the subjugation of the minds of the Italian people and the use of propaganda to do so. Press, radio, education, films—all were carefully supervised to create the illusion that fascism was the doctrine of the twentieth century, replacing liberalism and democracy.^{[citation needed]} A lavish cult of personality centered on Mussolini was promoted by the regime.

Standard of Benito Mussolini.

The principles of this doctrine were laid down in the article on fascism, written by Giovanni Gentile and signed by Mussolini that appeared in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana. In 1929, a concordat with the Vatican was signed, the Lateran treaties, by which the Italian state was at last recognised by the Roman Catholic Church, and the independence of Vatican City was recognised by the Italian state.

The 1929 treaty included a legal provision whereby the Italian government would protect the honor and dignity of the Pope by prosecuting offenders.^[78] In 1927, Mussolini was re-baptised by a Roman Catholic priest in an attempt to assuage certain Catholic opposition, who were still critical.^{[citation needed]} After 1929, Mussolini, with his anti-Communist doctrines, convinced many Catholics to actively support him. In the encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno, Pope Pius XI attacked the Fascist regime for its policy against the Catholic Action and certain tendencies to overrule Catholic education morals.^{[citation needed]}

The law codes of the parliamentary system were rewritten under Mussolini. All teachers in schools and universities had to swear an oath to defend the fascist regime. Newspaper editors were all personally chosen by Mussolini and no one who did not possess a certificate of approval from the fascist party could practice journalism. These certificates were issued in secret; Mussolini thus skillfully created the illusion of a "free press". The trade unions were also deprived of any independence and were integrated into what was called the "corporative" system. The aim (never completely achieved), inspired by medieval guilds, was to place all Italians in various professional organizations or "corporations", all of which were under clandestine governmental control.

Large sums of money were spent on highly visible public works, and on international prestige projects such as the Blue Riband ocean liner SS Rex and aeronautical achievements such as the world's fastest seaplane the Macchi M.C.72 and the transatlantic flying boat cruise of Italo Balbo, who was greeted with much fanfare in the United States when he landed in Chicago.

Role of education and youth organizations[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Benito Mussolini and Fascist Blackshirt youth in 1935.

Nationalists in the years after the war thought of themselves as combating the both liberal and domineering institutions created by cabinets such as those of Giovanni Giolitti, including traditional schooling. Futurism, a revolutionary cultural movement which would serve as a catalyst for Fascism, argued for "a school for physical courage and patriotism", as expressed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1919. Marinetti expressed his disdain for "the by now prehistoric and troglodyte Ancient Greek and Latin courses", arguing for their replacement with exercise modelled on those of the Arditi soldiers ("[learning] to advance on hands and knees in front of razing machine gun fire; to wait open-eyed for a crossbeam to move sideways over their heads etc."). It was in those years that the first Fascist youth wings were formed Avanguardia Giovanile Fascista (Fascist Youth Vanguards) in 1919, and Gruppi Universitari Fascisti (Fascist University Groups), in 1922.

After the March on Rome that brought Benito Mussolini to power, the Fascists started considering ways to ideologize the Italian society, with an accent on schools. Mussolini assigned former ardito and deputy-secretary for Education Renato Ricci the task of "reorganizing the youth from a moral and physical point of view". Ricci sought inspiration with Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, meeting with him in England, as well as with Bauhaus artists in Germany. The Opera Nazionale Balilla was created through Mussolini's decree of 3 April 1926, and was led by Ricci for the following eleven years. It included children between the ages of 8 and 18, grouped as the Balilla and the Avanguardisti.

According to Mussolini: "Fascist education is moral, physical, social, and military: it aims to create a complete and harmoniously developed human, a fascist one according to our views". Mussolini structured this process taking in view the emotional side of childhood: "Childhood and adolescence alike ... cannot be fed solely by concerts, theories, and abstract teaching. The truth we aim to teach them should appeal foremost to their fantasy, to their hearts, and only then to their minds".

The "educational value set through action and example" was to replace the established approaches. Fascism opposed its version of idealism to prevalent rationalism, and used the Opera Nazionale Balilla to circumvent educational tradition by imposing the collective and hierarchy, as well as Mussolini's own personality cult.

Foreign policy[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

In foreign policy, Mussolini soon shifted from the anti-imperialism of his lead-up to power to an extreme form of aggressive nationalism. He dreamt of making Italy a nation that was "great, respected, and feared" throughout Europe, and indeed the world. An early example was his bombardment of Corfu in 1923. Soon after he succeeded in setting up a puppet regime in Albania and in ruthlessly consolidating Italian power in Libya, which had been loosely a colony since 1912. It was his dream to make the Mediterranean mare nostrum ("our sea" in Latin), and he established a large naval base on the Greek island of Leros to enforce a strategic hold on the eastern Mediterranean.

His first steps into foreign policy seemed to portray him as a "statesman", for he participated in the Locarno Treaties of 1925 and the attempted Four Power Pact of 1933 was Mussolini's brainchild. Following the Stresa Front against Germany in 1935, Mussolini's policy took a dramatic turning point and revealed itself once again to be that of an aggressive nature. This domino effect of war began with the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. He also disagreed with Hitler's treaties with the Soviet Union.^{[better source needed]}

Conquest of Ethiopia[link]

In an effort to create an Italian Empire – or as supporters called it, the New Roman Empire^[79] – Italy set its sights on Ethiopia with an invasion that was carried out rapidly. Italy's forces were far superior to the Abyssinian forces, especially in regards to air power, and they were soon victorious. Emperor Haile Selassie was forced to flee the country, with Italy entering the capital Addis Ababa to proclaim an empire by May 1936, making Ethiopia part of Italian East Africa.^[80]

Although all of the major European powers of the time had also colonised parts of Africa and committed atrocities in their colonies, the Scramble for Africa had finished by the beginning of the twentieth century. The international mood was now against colonialist expansion and Italy's actions were condemned. Retroactively, Italy was criticised for its use of mustard gas and phosgene against its enemies and also for its zero tolerance approach to enemy guerrillas, allegedly authorised by Mussolini.^[80]

Spanish Republican poster against "the Italian invader".

When Rodolfo Graziani the viceroy of Ethiopia was nearly assassinated at an official ceremony, with the guerrilla bomb exploding among the people there, a very stronghanded reaction followed against the guerrillas, including those who were prisoners according to the International Red Cross.^[80] The IRC also alleged that Italy bombed their tents in areas of guerrillas military encampment; though Italy denied it had intended to, insisting that the rebels were targeted.^[80] It was not until the East African Campaign's conclusion in 1941 that Italy lost its East African territories, after taking on a fourteen nation allied force.

Spanish Civil War[link]

Italian military help to Nationalists against the anti-clerical and anti-Catholic atrocities committed by the Republican side worked well in Italian propaganda targeting Catholics. On 27 July 1936 the first squadron of Italian airplanes sent by Benito Mussolini arrived in Spain.^[81] This active intervention in 1936–1939 on the side of Franco in the Spanish Civil War ended any possibility of reconciliation with France and Britain. As a result, his relationship with Adolf Hitler became closer, and he chose to accept the German annexation of Austria in 1938 and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1939. At the Munich Conference in September 1938, he posed as a moderate working for European peace, helping Nazi Germany seize control of the Sudetenland. His "axis" with Germany was confirmed when he made the "Pact of Steel" with Hitler in May 1939, as the previous "Rome-Berlin Axis" of 1936 had been unofficial. Members of TIGR, a Slovene anti-fascist group, plotted to kill Mussolini in Kobarid in 1938, but their attempt was unsuccessful.

Axis[link]

Rome-Berlin relations[link]

Mussolini in the company of Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, presiding over sporting events in honour of German veterans in Rome, 19th March 1938.

The relationship between Mussolini and Adolf Hitler was a contentious one early on. While Hitler cited Mussolini as an influence and expressed privately great admiration for him,^[82] Mussolini had little regard for Hitler, especially after the Nazis had assassinated his friend and ally, Engelbert Dollfuss the Austrofascist dictator of Austria in 1934.

With the assassination of Dollfuss, Mussolini attempted to distance himself from Hitler by rejecting much of the racialism (particularly Nordicism and Germanicism) and anti-Semitism espoused by the German radical. Mussolini during this period rejected biological racism, at least in the Nazi sense, and instead emphasized "Italianizing" the parts of the Italian Empire he had desired to build.^[83] He declared that the ideas of Eugenics and the racially charged concept of an Aryan nation were not possible.^[83]

Mussolini was particularly sensitive to German accusations that the Italians were a mongrelized race. He retaliated by mockingly referring to the Germans' own lack of racial purity on several occasions. When discussing the Nazi decree that the German people must carry a passport with either Aryan or Jewish racial affiliation marked on it, in the summer of 1934, Mussolini wondered how they would designate membership in the "Germanic race":

When German-Jewish journalist Emil Ludwig asked about his views on race, Mussolini exclaimed:

In a speech given in Bari, he reiterated his attitude toward German racism:

Mussolini's rejection of both racialism and the importance of race in 1934 during the height of his antagonism towards Hitler contradicted his own earlier statements about race, such as in 1928 in which he emphasized the importance of race:

Though Italian Fascism variated its official positions on race from the 1920s to 1934, ideologically Italian fascism did not originally discriminate against the Italian Jewish community: Mussolini recognised that a small contingent had lived there "since the days of the Kings of Rome" and should "remain undisturbed".^[89] There were even some Jews in the National Fascist Party, such as Ettore Ovazza who in 1935 founded the Jewish Fascist paper La Nostra Bandiera ("Our Flag").^[90]

By 1938, the enormous influence Hitler now had over Mussolini became clear with the introduction of the Manifesto of Race. The Manifesto, which was closely modeled on the Nazi Nuremberg laws,^[67] stripped Jews of their Italian citizenship and with it any position in the government or professions. The German influence on Italian policy upset the established balance in Fascist Italy and proved highly unpopular to most Italians, to the extent that Pope Pius XII sent a letter to Mussolini protesting against the new laws.^{[citation needed]}

It has been widely speculated that Mussolini's reasoning to adopt the Manifesto of Race in 1938 was merely tactical, in order to strengthen Italy's relations with Germany. In December 1943, Mussolini made a confession to Bruno Spampanato that seems to indicate that he regretted the Manifesto of Race, as Mussolini put it:

Mussolini also reached out to the Muslims in his empire and in the predominantly Arab countries of the Middle East. In 1937, the Muslims of Libya presented Mussolini with the "Sword of Islam" while Fascist propaganda pronounced him as the "Protector of Islam."^[92]

Munich Conference, war looming[link]

From left to right, Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini and Italian Foreign Minister Count Ciano as they prepare to sign the Munich Agreement.

By the late 1930s, Mussolini's obsession with demography led him to conclude that Britain and France were finished as powers, and that it was Germany and Italy who were destined to rule Europe if for no other reason than their demographic strength.^[93] Mussolini stated his belief that declining birth rates in France were "absolutely horrifying" and that the British Empire was doomed because one-quarter of the British population was over 50. ^[94] As such, Mussolini believed that an alliance with Germany was preferable to an alignment with Britain and France as it was better to be allied with the strong instead of the weak. ^[95] The only things that held Mussolini back from full alignment with Berlin were his awareness of Italian economic and military weaknesses, which required further time to rearm and his desire to use the Easter Accords of April 1938 as a way of splitting Britain from France. ^[96] A military alliance with Germany as opposed to the already existing looser political alliance with the Reich under the Anti-Comintern Pact (which had no military commitments) would end any chance of Britain implementing the Easter Accords. ^[97] The Easter Accords in turn was intended by Mussolini to allow Italy to take on France alone by sufficiently improving Anglo-Italian relations that London would presumably remain neutral in the event of a Franco-Italian war. ^[97] In turn, the Easter Accords were intended by Britain to win Italy away from Germany.

Mussolini had imperial designs on Tunisia, and had some support in that country.^[98] In January 1939, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain visited Rome, during which visit, Mussolini learned that through Britain very much wanted better relations with Italy, and was prepared to make concessions, that Britain would not sever all ties with France for the sake of an improved Anglo-Italian relationship. ^[99] With that, Mussolini grew more interested in the German offer of a military alliance, which first been made in May 1938. ^[99] The new course was not without its critics. On 21 March 1939, during a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council, Italo Balbo accused Mussolini of "licking Hitler's boots", blasted the Duce's pro-German foreign policy as leading Italy to disaster, and noted that the "opening to Britain" still existed and it was not inevitable that Italy had to ally with Germany. ^[100] Through many gerarchi like Balbo were not keen on closer relations with Berlin, Mussolini's control of the foreign-policy machinery meant this dissidence counted for little. ^[100] In April 1939, Mussolini ordered the Italy invaded Albania. Italy defeated Albania within just five days forcing king Zog to flee, setting up a period of Albania under Italy. Until May 1939, the Axis had not been entirely official, but during that month the Pact of Steel treaty was signed outlining the "friendship and alliance" between Germany and Italy, signed by each of its foreign ministers.^[101] The Pact of Steel was an offensive and defensive military alliance, through Mussolini had signed the treaty only after receiving a promise from the Germans that there would be no war for the next three years. Italy's king Victor Emanuel III was also wary of the pact, favouring the more traditional Italian allies like France, and fearful of the implications of an offensive military alliance, which in effect meant surrendering control over questions of war and peace to Hitler.^[102]

Hitler was intent on invading Poland, though Galeazzo Ciano warned this would likely lead to war with the Allies. Hitler dismissed Ciano's comment, predicting that instead that Britain and the other Western countries would back down, and he suggested that Italy should invade Yugoslavia.^[103] The offer was tempting to Mussolini, but at that stage world war would be a disaster for Italy as the armaments situation from building the Italian Empire thus far was lean. Most significantly, Victor Emmanuel had demanded neutrality in the dispute.^[103] Thus when World War II in Europe began on 1 September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland eliciting the response of the United Kingdom and France declaring war on Germany, Italy did not become involved in the conflict.^[103]

War declared[link]

As World War II began, Ciano and Viscount Halifax were holding secret phone conversations. The British wanted Italy on their side against Germany as it had been in World War I.^[103] French government opinion was more geared towards action against Italy; they were eager to attack Italy in Libya. In September 1939, France swung to the opposite extreme, offering to discuss issues with Italy, but as the French were unwilling to discuss Corsica, Nice and Savoy, Mussolini did not answer.^[103]

Convinced that the war would soon be over, with a German victory looking likely at that point, Mussolini decided to enter the war on the Axis side. Accordingly, Italy declared war on Britain and France on 10 June 1940.^[104] Italy joined the Germans in the Battle of France, fighting the fortified Alpine Line at the border. Just eleven days later, France surrendered to the Axis powers. Included in Italian-controlled France was most of Nice and other southeastern counties.^[104] Meanwhile in Africa, Mussolini's Italian East Africa forces attacked the British in their Sudan, Kenya and British Somaliland colonies, in what would become known as the East African Campaign.^[105] British Somaliland was conquered and became part of Italian East Africa on 3 August 1940, and there were Italian advances in Sudan and Kenya.^[106]

Just over a month later, the Italian Tenth Army commanded by General Rodolfo Graziani crossed from Italian Libya into Egypt where British forces were located; this would become the Western Desert Campaign. Advances were successful, but the Italians stopped at Sidi Barrani waiting for logistic supplies to catch up. During 25 October 1940, Mussolini sent the Italian Air Corps to Belgium, where the air force took part in the Battle of Britain for around two months.^[107] In October, Mussolini also sent Italian forces into Greece starting the Greco-Italian War. After initial success, this backfired as the Greek counterattack proved relentless, resulting in Italy losing one quarter of Albania. Germany soon committed forces to the Balkans to fight the gathering Allies.^{[better source needed]}

Events in Africa had changed by early 1941 as Operation Compass had forced the Italians back into Libya, causing high losses in the Italian Army.^[108] Also in the East African Campaign, an attack was mounted against Italian forces. Despite putting up a resistance, they were overwhelmed at the Battle of Keren, and the Italian defense started to crumble with a final defeat in the Battle of Gondar. When addressing the Italian public on the events, he was completely open about the situation saying, "We call bread bread and wine wine, and when the enemy wins a battle it is useless and ridiculous to seek, as the English do in their incomparable hypocrisy, to deny or diminish it."^[109] Part of his comment was in relation to earlier success the Italians had in Africa, before being defeated by an Allied force later. In danger of losing the control of all Italian possessions in North Africa, Germany finally sent the Afrika Korps to support Italy. Meanwhile Operation Marita took place in Yugoslavia to end the Greco-Italian War, resulting in an Axis victory and the Occupation of Greece by Italy and Germany.^[110] With the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, Mussolini declared war on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and sent an army to fight there. Mussolini first learned of Barbarossa after it began on 22 June 1941, and was not asked by Hitler to involve himself. ^[111] Mussolini took the initiative in ordering an Italian Army Corps to head to the Eastern Front, where he hoped that Italy might score an easy victory to restore the Fascist regime’s lustre which had been damaged by defeats in Greece and North Africa; Mussolini told the Council of Ministers of 5 July that his only worry was that Germany might defeat the Soviet Union before the Italians arrived. ^[112] At a meeting with Hitler in August, Mussolini offered and Hitler accepted the commitment of further Italian troops to the Soviet Union. ^[113] The heavy losses suffered by the Italians on the Eastern Front, where service was extremely unpopular owing to the widespread view that this was not Italy's fight did much to damage Mussolini's prestige with the Italian people. ^[113] After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941.^{[better source needed]} An interesting evidence regarding Mussolini's response to the attack on Pearl Harbor comes from the diary of his Foreign Minister Ciano:

"A night telephone call from Ribbentrop. He is overjoyed about the Japanese attack on America. He is so happy about it that I am happy with him, though I am not too sure about the final advantages of what has happened. One thing is now certain, that America will enter the conflict and that the conflict will be so long that she will be able to realize all her potential forces. This morning I told this to the King who had been pleased about the event. He ended by admitting that, in the long run, I may be right. Mussolini was happy, too. For a long time he has favored a definite clarification of relations between America and the Axis".^[114]

Dismissed and arrested[link]

By early 1942, Italy's position in the war became more and more untenable. After the defeat at El Alamein at the end of 1942, the Axis troops had to retreat to where they were finally defeated in the Tunisia Campaign in the spring of 1943. Also at the Eastern Front were major setbacks and the war had come to the nation's very doorstep with the Allied invasion of Sicily.^[115] The Italian home front was also in bad shape as the Allied bombings were taking their toll. Factories all over Italy were brought to a virtual standstill due to a lack of raw materials, as well as coal and oil. Additionally, there was a chronic shortage of food, and what food was available was being sold at nearly confiscatory prices. Mussolini's once-ubiquitous propaganda machine lost its grip on the people; a large number of Italians turned to Vatican Radio or Radio London for more accurate news coverage. Discontent came to a head in March 1943 with a wave of labor strikes in the industrial north—the first large-scale strikes since 1925.^[116] Also in March, some of the major factories in Milan and Turin stopped production to secure evacuation allowances for workers' families. The physical German presence in Italy had sharply turned public opinion against Mussolini; for example, when the Allies invaded Sicily, the majority of the public there welcomed them as liberators.^[117]

Earlier in April 1943, Mussolini had begged Hitler to make a separate peace with Stalin and send German troops to the west to guard against an expected Allied invasion of Italy. Mussolini feared that with the losses in Tunisia and North Africa, the next logical step for Dwight Eisenhower's armies would be to come across the Mediterranean and attack the Italian peninsula. Within a few days of the Allied landings on Sicily in July 1943, it was obvious Mussolini's army was on the brink of collapse. This led Hitler to summon Mussolini to a meeting in northern Italy on 19 July 1943. By this time, Mussolini was so shaken from stress that he could no longer stand Hitler's boasting. His mood darkened further when that same day, the Allies bombed Rome—the first time that city had ever been the target of enemy bombing.^[118]

	Dismissal and arrest of Mussolini noicon Italian radio statement announcing the dismissal of Mussolini, 25 July 1943.
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

Some prominent members of the Italian Fascist government had turned against Mussolini by this point. Among them were his confidant Dino Grandi and Mussolini's son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano. With several of his colleagues close to revolt, Mussolini was forced to summon the Grand Council of Fascism on 24 July 1943: the first time that body had met since the start of the war. When he announced that the Germans were thinking of evacuating the south, Grandi launched a blistering attack on him.^[115] Grandi moved a resolution asking the king to resume his full constitutional powers, in effect, a vote of no confidence in Mussolini. This motion carried by a 19–7 margin. Despite this sharp rebuke, Mussolini showed up for work the next day as usual. He allegedly viewed the Grand Council as merely an advisory body and did not think the vote would have any substantive effect.^[116] That afternoon, he was summoned to the royal palace by King Victor Emmanuel III, who had been planning to oust Mussolini earlier. When Mussolini tried to tell the king about the meeting, Victor Emmanuel cut him off and told him that he was being replaced by Marshal Pietro Badoglio.^[116] After Mussolini left the palace, he was arrested by Carabinieri on the king's orders.^[119]

Mussolini rescued by German troops from his prison in Campo Imperatore on 12 September 1943.

By this time, discontent with Mussolini was such that when the news of his ouster was announced on the radio, there was no resistance.^[116] In an effort to conceal his location from the Germans, Mussolini was moved around the country before being sent to Campo Imperatore, a mountain resort in Abruzzo where he was completely isolated.^[115] Given the large Nazi presence in Italy, Badoglio announced that "the war continues at the side of our Germanic ally" in the hopes that chaos and Nazi retaliation against civilians could be avoided.^[115] Even as Badoglio was keeping up the appearance of loyalty to the Axis, he dissolved the Fascist Party two days after taking over. Also, his government was negotiating an Armistice with the Allies, which was signed on 3 September 1943. Its announcement five days later threw Italy into chaos, a civil war of sorts. Badoglio and the king fled Rome, leaving the Italian Army without orders. Immediately after the Italian surrender was announced, German troops started taking over the Italian Peninsula by force as part of Operation Achse and occupied Rome on 10 September.^[120] After a period of anarchy, Italy finally declared war on Nazi Germany on 13 October 1943 from Malta; thousands of troops were supplied to fight against the Germans, others refused to switch sides and had joined the Germans. The Badoglio government held a social truce with the leftist partisans for the sake of Italy and to rid the land of the Nazis.^[121]

Italian Social Republic[link]

Only two months after Mussolini had been dismissed and arrested, he was rescued from his prison at the Hotel Campo Imperatore in the Gran Sasso raid by a special Fallschirmjäger unit on 12 September 1943; present was Otto Skorzeny.^[119] The rescue saved Mussolini from being turned over to the Allies, as per the armistice.^[121] Hitler had made plans to arrest the king, Crown Prince Umberto, Badoglio, and the rest of the government and restore Mussolini to power in Rome, but the government's escape south likely foiled those plans.^[118]

A rain-soaked Benito Mussolini reviewing adolescent soldiers in northern Italy, late 1944

Three days following his rescue in the Gran Sasso raid, Mussolini was taken to Germany for a meeting with Hitler in Rastenberg at his East Prussian headquarters. Despite public professions of support, Hitler was clearly shocked by Mussolini's disheveled and haggard appearance as well as his unwillingness to go after the men in Rome who overthrew him. At this time, Mussolini was in very poor health which was the result of severe stress because of Italy's bleak war situation and he wanted to retire from politics altogether.^{[citation needed]} Hitler firmly told him that unless he agreed to return to Italy and set up a new fascist state, the Germans would destroy Milan, Genoa and Turin.^{[citation needed]} Feeling that he had to do what he could to blunt the edges of Nazi repression, Mussolini agreed to set up a new regime, the Italian Social Republic,^[115] informally known as the Salò Republic because of its administration from the town of Salò where he settled in just 11 days after his rescue by the Germans. Mussolini's new regime faced numerous territorial losses: in addition to losing the Italian lands held by the Allies and Badoglio's government, the provinces of Bolzano, Belluno and Trento were placed under German administration in the Operational Zone of the Alpine Foothills, while the provinces of Udine, Gorizia, Trieste, Pola (now Pula), Fiume (now Rijeka) and Ljubljana (Lubiana) were incorporated into the German Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral.^[122] In addition, the German army occupied the Dalmatian provinces of Split (Spalato) and Kotor (Cattaro), which were subsequently annexed by the Croatian fascist regime. Italy's gains in Greece and Albania were also lost to Germany, with the exception of the Italian Aegean Islands, which remained nominally under RSI rule.^[123] Mussolini opposed any territorial reductions of the Italian state and told his associates "I am not here to renounce even a square meter of state territory. We will go back to war for this. And we will rebel against anyone for this. Where the Italian flag flew, the Italian flag will return. And where it has not been lowered, now that I am here, no one will have it lowered. I have said these things to the Führer".^[124]

For two years, Mussolini lived in Gargnano on Lake Garda in Lombardy during this period. Although he insisted in public that he was in full control, he himself knew that he was little more than a puppet ruler under the protection of his German liberators—for all intents and purposes, the Gauleiter of Lombardy.^[118] After yielding to pressures from Hitler and the remaining loyal fascists who formed the government of the Republic of Salo, Mussolini helped orchestrate a series of executions of some of the fascist leaders who had betrayed him at the last meeting of the Fascist Grand Council. One of those executed included his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano. As Head of State and Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Italian Social Republic, Mussolini used much of his time to write his memoirs. Along with his autobiographical writings of 1928, these writings would be combined and published by Da Capo Press as My Rise and Fall. In an interview in January 1945, a few months before he was captured and executed by Italian anti-fascist partisans, he stated flatly: "Seven years ago, I was an interesting person. Now, I am little more then a corpse." He continued:

Death[link]

Cross marking the place in Mezzegra where Mussolini was shot.

The dead body of Mussolini (second from left) next to Petacci (middle) and other executed fascists in Piazzale Loreto, Milan, 1945

American newsreel coverage of the death of Mussolini in 1945

Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were stopped by communist partisans Valerio and Bellini and identified by the Political Commissar of the partisans' 52nd Garibaldi Brigade, Urbano Lazzaro, on 27 April 1945, near the village of Dongo (Lake Como), as they headed for Switzerland to board a plane to escape to Spain. During this time Claretta's brother even posed as a Spanish consul.^[126] Mussolini had been traveling with retreating German forces and was apprehended while attempting to escape recognition by wearing a German military uniform.^{[citation needed]} After several unsuccessful attempts to take them to Como they were brought to Mezzegra. They spent their last night in the house of the De Maria family.

The next day, Mussolini and Petacci were both summarily executed, along with most of the members of their 15-man train, primarily ministers and officials of the Italian Social Republic. The shootings took place in the small village of Giulino di Mezzegra. According to the official version of events, the shootings were conducted by Colonnello Valerio, whose real name was Walter Audisio. Audisio was the communist partisan commander who was reportedly given the order to kill Mussolini by the National Liberation Committee. When Audisio entered the room where Mussolini and the other fascists were being held, he reportedly announced, "I have come to rescue you!... Do you have any weapons?" He then had them loaded into transports and driven a short distance. Audisio ordered, "Get down"; Petacci hugged Mussolini and refused to move away from him when they were taken to an empty space. Shots were fired and Petacci fell down. Just then Mussolini opened his jacket and screamed, "Shoot me in the chest!" Audisio complied and shot him in the chest. Mussolini fell but did not die and was breathing heavily. Audisio went near and he shot one more bullet in his chest. Mussolini's face looked as if he had significant pain. Audisio said to his driver, "Look at his face, the emotions on his face don't suit him." The other members of Mussolini's entourage were also executed before a firing squad later that same day towards nightfall.^[127]

Mussolini's body[link]

On 29 April 1945, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and the other executed Fascists were loaded into a moving van and trucked south to Milan. There, at 3:00 am, they were dumped on the ground in the old Piazzale Loreto. The piazza had been renamed "Piazza Quindici Martiri" in honor of 15 anti-Fascists recently executed there.^[128]

After being shot, kicked, and spat upon, the bodies were hung upside down on meathooks from the roof of an Esso gas station.^[129] The bodies were then stoned by civilians from below. This was done both to discourage any Fascists from continuing the fight and as an act of revenge for the hanging of many partisans in the same place by Axis authorities. The corpse of the deposed leader became subject to ridicule and abuse. Fascist loyalist Achille Starace was captured and sentenced to death and then taken to the Piazzale Loreto and shown the body of Mussolini. Starace, who once said of Mussolini "He is a god,"^[130] saluted what was left of his leader just before he was shot. The body of Starace was subsequently strung up next to the body of Mussolini.

After his death and the display of his corpse in Milan, Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave in the Musocco cemetery, to the north of the city. On Easter Sunday 1946 his body was located and dug up by Domenico Leccisi and two other neo-Fascists. Making off with their hero, they left a message on the open grave: "Finally, O Duce, you are with us. We will cover you with roses, but the smell of your virtue will overpower the smell of those roses."^{[citation needed]}

Tomb of Mussolini in the family crypt in the cemetery of Predappio.

On the loose for months—and a cause of great anxiety to the new Italian democracy—the Duce's body was finally "recaptured" in August, hidden in a small trunk at the Certosa di Pavia, just outside Milan. Two Fransciscan brothers were subsequently charged with concealing the corpse, though it was discovered on further investigation that it had been constantly on the move. Unsure what to do, the authorities held the remains in a kind of political limbo for 10 years, before agreeing to allow them to be re-interred at Predappio in Romagna, his birth place, after a campaign headed by Leccisi and the Movimento Sociale Italiano.^{[citation needed]}

Leccisi, a fascist deputy, went on to write his autobiography, With Mussolini Before and After Piazzale Loreto. Adone Zoli, the prime minister of the day, contacted Donna Rachele, the former dictator's widow, to tell her he was returning the remains, as he needed the support of the far-right in parliament, including Leccisi himself. In Predappio the dictator was buried in a crypt (the only posthumous honour granted to Mussolini). His tomb is flanked by marble fasces, and a large idealised marble bust of himself sits above the tomb.^[131]

Personal life[link]

Mussolini was first married to Ida Dalser in Trento in 1914.^[46] The couple had a son one year later and named him Benito Albino Mussolini. In December 1915, Mussolini married Rachele Guidi, his mistress since 1910, and with his following political ascendency the information about his first marriage was suppressed and both his first wife and son were later persecuted.^[46] With Rachele, Mussolini had two daughters, Edda (1910–1995) and Anna Maria (Forlì, Villa Carpena, 3 September 1929 – Rome, 25 April 1968), married in Ravenna on 11 June 1960 to Nando Pucci Negri, and three sons Vittorio (1916–1997), Bruno (1918–1941), and Romano (1927–2006). Mussolini had a number of mistresses among them Margherita Sarfatti and his final companion, Clara Petacci. Furthermore, Mussolini had innumerable brief sexual encounters with female supporters as reported by his biographer Nicholas Farrell.^[132]

Religious beliefs[link]

Atheism and anti-clericalism[link]

Mussolini was raised by a devoutly Catholic mother^[133] and an anti-clerical father.^[134] His mother Rosa had him baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, and took her children to services every Sunday. His father never attended.^[133] Mussolini regarded his time at a religious boarding school as punishment, compared the experience to hell, and "once refused to go to morning mass and had to be dragged there by force".^[135]

Mussolini would become anti-clerical like his father. As a young man, he "proclaimed himself to be an atheist and several times tried to shock an audience by calling on God to strike him dead."^[134] He denounced socialists who were tolerant of religion, or who had their children baptized. He believed that science had proven there was no God, and that the historical Jesus was ignorant and mad. He considered religion a disease of the psyche, and accused Christianity of promoting resignation and cowardice.^[134]

Mussolini was an admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Denis Mack Smith, "In Nietzsche he found justification for his crusade against the Christian virtues of humility, resignation, charity, and goodness."^[136] He valued Nietzsche's concept of the superman, "The supreme egoist who defied both God and the masses, who despised egalitarianism and democracy, who believed in the weakest going to the wall and pushing them if they did not go fast enough."^[136]

Mussolini made vitriolic attacks against Christianity and the Catholic Church, "which he accompanied with provocative and blasphemous remarks about the consecrated host and about a love affair between Christ and Mary Magdalen."^[137] He believed that socialists who were Christian or who accepted religious marriage should be expelled from the party. He denounced the Catholic Church for "its authoritarianism and refusal to allow freedom of thought..." Mussolini's newspaper, La Lotta di Classe, reportedly had an anti-Christian editorial stance.^[137]

Lateran Pact[link]

Despite making such attacks, Mussolini would try to win popular support by appeasing the Catholic majority in Italy. In 1924, Mussolini saw that three of his children were given communion. In 1925, he had a priest perform a religious marriage ceremony for himself and his wife Rachele, whom he had married in a civil ceremony 10 years earlier.^[138] On 11 February 1929, he signed a concordat and treaty with the Roman Catholic Church.^[139] Under the Lateran Pact, Vatican City was granted independent statehood and placed under Church law—rather than Italian law—and the Catholic religion was recognized as Italy's state religion.^[140] The Church also regained authority over marriage, Catholicism could be taught in all secondary schools, birth control and freemasonry were banned, and the clergy received subsidies from the state, and was exempted from taxation.^[141][142] Pope Pius XI praised Mussolini, and the official Catholic newspaper pronounced "Italy has been given back to God and God to Italy."^[140]

After this conciliation, he claimed the Church was subordinate to the State, and "referred to Catholicism as, in origin, a minor sect that had spread beyond Palestine only because grafted onto the organization of the Roman empire."^[139] After the concordat, "he confiscated more issues of Catholic newspapers in the next three months than in the previous seven years."^[139] Mussolini reportedly came close to being excommunicated from the Catholic Church around this time.^[139]

Mussolini publicly reconciled with the Pope Pius XI in 1932, but "took care to exclude from the newspapers any photography of himself kneeling or showing deference to the Pope."^[139] He wanted to persuade Catholics that "[f]ascism was Catholic and he himself a believer who spent some of each day in prayer..."^[139] The Pope began referring to Mussolini as "a man sent by Providence."^[137][139] Despite Mussolini's efforts to appear pious, by order of his party, pronouns referring to him "had to be capitalized like those referring to God..."^[139]

In 1938 Mussolini began reasserting his anti-clericalism. He would sometimes refer to himself as an "outright disbeliever," and once told his cabinet that "Islam was perhaps a more effective religion than Christianity" and that the "papacy was a malignant tumor in the body of Italy and must 'be rooted out once and for all', because there was no room in Rome for both the Pope and himself."^[143] He would publicly back down from these anti-clerical statements, but continued making similar statements in private.

After his fall from power in 1943, Mussolini began speaking "more about God and the obligations of conscience", although "he still had little use for the priests and sacraments of the Church,".^[144] He also began drawing parallels between himself and Jesus Christ.^[144] Mussolini's widow, Rachele, stated that her husband had remained "basically irreligious until the later years of his life.^[145] Mussolini was given a Catholic funeral in 1957.^[146]

Legacy[link]

Mussolini was survived by his wife, Rachele Mussolini, two sons, Vittorio and Romano Mussolini, and his daughters Edda, the widow of Count Ciano, and Anna Maria. A third son, Bruno, was killed in an air accident while flying a P108 bomber on a test mission, on 7 August 1941.^[147] His oldest son, Benito Albino Mussolini, from his marriage with Ida Dalser, was ordered to stop declaring that Mussolini was his father and in 1935 forcibly committed to an asylum in Milan, where he was murdered on 26 August 1942 after repeated coma-inducing injections.^[46] Actress Sophia Loren's sister, Anna Maria Scicolone, was formerly married to Romano Mussolini, Mussolini's son. Mussolini's granddaughter Alessandra Mussolini was a member of the European Parliament for the far right party Alternativa Sociale and currently serves in the Chamber of Deputies as a member of the ruling People of Freedom. Other relatives of Edda (Castrianni) moved to England after World War II.^{[citation needed]}

Mussolini's National Fascist Party was banned in the postwar Constitution of Italy, but a number of successor neo-fascist parties emerged to carry on its legacy. Historically, the strongest neo-fascist party was MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano), which was declared dissolved in 1995 and replaced by the National Alliance, which distanced itself from Fascism (its leader Gianfranco Fini once declared that Fascism was "an absolute evil"). These parties were united under Silvio Berlusconi's House of Freedoms coalition and in 2009 a broad based group of right-wing parties, including Gianfranco Fini's National Alliance and Alessandra Mussolini's Azione Sociale, were merged to create The People of Freedom party led by Prime Minister Berlusconi.

In popular culture[link]

American wartime comic showing Mussolini, Hitler and Hirohito beaten by superheroes

Charlie Chaplin's 1940 film The Great Dictator satirizes Mussolini as "Benzino Napaloni", portrayed by Jack Oakie. In the Three Stooges' I'll Never Heil Again, Cy Schindell plays "Chizzolini", from the then topical insult of "chisler".

More serious biographical depictions include a look at the last few days of Mussolini's life in Carlo Lizzani's movie Mussolini: Ultimo atto (Mussolini: The last act, 1974) starring Rod Steiger and George C. Scott's portrayal in the 1985 television mini-series Mussolini: The Untold Story.

Another 1985 movie was Mussolini and I, in which Bob Hoskins plays the dictator (with Susan Sarandon as his daughter Edda and Anthony Hopkins as Count Ciano). Actor Antonio Banderas also played the title role in Benito in 1993, which covered his life from his school teacher days to the beginning of World War I, before his rise as dictator. Mussolini is also depicted in the films Tea with Mussolini, Lion of the Desert (also with Steiger) and the award-winning Italian film Vincere.

A comic strip ran in the British comic The Beano entitled Musso the Wop. This strip which ran from 1940 to 1943 featured Mussolini as an arrogant buffoon.^[148]