Italian Fascism

Wednesday, 21 November 2012

Benito Mussolini: Biography of Fascist Italy's Dictator

Fascist Italy and the Jews: Myth versus Reality (part 1)

Italian Fascist footage - Mussolini speech

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Beer Hall Putsch
The Beer Hall Putsch (also known as the Munich Putsch,German: Hitlerputsch or German: Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch) was a failed attempt at revolution that occurred between the evening of 8 November and the early afternoon of 9 November 1923, when Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff, and other heads of the Kampfbund unsuccessfully tried to seize power in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.
Beer halls in the early 20th century existed in most larger southern German cities, where hundreds or even thousands of people were able to gather during the evenings, drink beer and often engage in political or social debate. They were also places where political rallies could be held, a tradition still alive today. One of the largest beer halls in Munich was the "Bürgerbräukeller", where the Beer Hall Putsch was launched.
German power and prestige were destroyed in the aftermath of World War I. Like many other German nationalists, Hitler believed in the Dolchstoßlegende (Stab-in-the-back legend), which claimed that the army, "undefeated in the field," had been "stabbed in the back" by civilian leaders and Marxists back on the home front, later dubbed the November Criminals. In Munich, Hitler took part in "national thinking" courses organized by the Education and Propaganda Department of the Bavarian Reichswehr under Captain Karl Mayr. Thereafter, Captain Mayr ordered Hitler, then an Army corporal, to infiltrate the tiny Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated DAP (German Workers Party). Hitler joined the DAP on 12 September 1919. Hitler rose to its top post in the chaotic political atmosphere of postwar Munich. By agreement, Hitler was given the political leadership of several Bavarian "patriotic associations" (revanchist) which collectively were known as the Kampfbund. With this political base, Hitler could call on about 15,000 brawlers, mostly ex-soldiers.

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Brenner Pass
Brenner Pass (German: Brennerpass; Italian: Passo del Brennero) is a mountain pass through the Alps along the border between Italy and Austria, and is one of the principal passes of the Alps. It is the lowest of the Alpine passes, and one of the few in the area. For that reason possession of the pass has long been coveted.
Below the pass, high Alpine pastures have been used by dairy cattle for summer grazing, making space available at lower altitudes for cultivating and harvesting hay for winter fodder. Many of the high pastures are at altitudes over 1,000 metres.
The central section, the Brenner Pass itself, covers the track between Sterzing and Matrei, through the village of Brenner.
Prenner was originally the name of a nearby farm which derived from its former owner. The farm of a certain Prennerius is mentioned in documents in 1288, a certain Chunradus Prenner de Mittenwalde is mentioned in 1299. The name Prenner is traced back to the German word for somebody who clears woodland. A name for the pass itself appears for the first time in 1328 as ob dem Prenner (German for above the Prenner).

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British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1922 the British Empire held sway over about 458 million people, one-fifth of the world's population at the time, and covered more than 33,700,000 km² (13,012,000 sq mi), almost a quarter of the Earth's total land area. As a result, its political, linguistic and cultural legacy is widespread. At the peak of its power, it was often said that "the sun never sets on the British Empire" because its span across the globe ensured that the sun was always shining on at least one of its numerous territories.
During the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal and Spain pioneered European exploration of the globe, and in the process established large overseas empires. Envious of the great wealth these empires generated, England, France and the Netherlands began to establish colonies and trade networks of their own in the Americas and Asia. A series of wars in the 17th and 18th centuries with the Netherlands and France left England (and then, following union between England and Scotland in 1707, Great Britain) the dominant colonial power in North America and India. The loss of the Thirteen Colonies in North America in 1783 after a war of independence deprived Britain of some of its oldest and most populous colonies.

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Corsica
Corsica ( /ˈkɔːrsɪkə/; French: Corse, IPA: [kɔʁs]; Corsican: Corsica; Italian: Corsica, IPA: [ˈkɔrsika]) is a French island in the Mediterranean Sea. It is located west of Italy, southeast of the French mainland, and north of the Italian island of Sardinia. Mountains comprise two-thirds of the island, forming a single chain.
Corsica is one of the 27 régions of France, although strictly speaking Corsica is designated as a territorial collectivity (collectivité territoriale) by law. As a territorial collectivity, it enjoys greater powers than other French régions, but for the most part its status is quite similar. Corsica is referred to as a "région" in common speech, and is almost always listed among the other régions of France.
Although the island is separated from the continental mainland by the Ligurian Sea and is closer to Italy than to the French mainland, politically Corsica is part of Metropolitan France. It was once briefly an independent Corsican Republic, until being incorporated into France in 1769. Its culture has French and Italian elements blended into it.

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Dalmatia
Dalmatia (Croatian: Dalmacija, Croatian pronunciation: [dǎlmaːt͡sija]; see names in other languages) is a historical region on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, in Croatia. It stretches from the island of Rab in the northwest to the Bay of Kotor in the southeast. The hinterland, the Dalmatian Zagora, ranges from fifty kilometers in width in the north to just a few kilometers in the south. The Dalmatian dog received its name from Dalmatia, as does the dalmatic, a Roman Catholic liturgical vestment worn by deacons and bishops.
The name Dalmatia derives from the name of the tribe of the Dalmatae, which is connected with the Illyrian word delme, dele in modern Albanian, meaning "sheep" in English.
In antiquity the Roman province of Dalmatia was much larger than the present-day Dalmatia County of Croatia, stretching from Istria in the north to historical Albania in the south. Dalmatia signified not only a geographical unit, but was an entity based on common culture and settlement types, a common narrow eastern Adriatic coastal belt, Mediterranean climate, sclerophyllous vegetation of the Illyrian province, Adriatic carbonate platform, and karst geomorphology.

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Einsatzgruppen
Einsatzgruppen (German: "task forces"; singular Einsatzgruppe; official full name Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD) were SS paramilitary death squads that were responsible for mass killings, typically by shooting, of Jews in particular, but also significant numbers of other population groups and political categories. The Einsatzgruppen operated throughout the territory occupied by the German armed forces following the German invasions of Poland, in September, 1939, and later, of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Einsatzgruppen carried out operations ranging from the murder of a few people to operations which lasted over two or more days, such as the massacres at Babi Yar (33,771 killed in two days) and Rumbula (25,000 killed in two days). The Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the murders of over 1,000,000 people, and they were the first Nazi organizations to commence mass killing of Jews as an organized policy.
The Einsatzgruppen were formed under the direction of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (deputy to Heinrich Himmler) and operated by the Schutzstaffel (SS) before and during World War II. From September 1939 forward the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA - Reich Main Security Office) had overall command of the Einsatzgruppen. Their principal task during the war (according to SS General Erich von dem Bach at the Nuremberg Trials) "... was the annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet political commissars". The Einsatzgruppen had a leading role in the implementation of the final solution of the Jewish question (Die Endlösung der Judenfrage) in the conquered territories.

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Eritrea
Eritrea ( /ˌɛrɨˈtreɪ.ə/ or /ˌɛrɨˈtriːə/;Ge'ez: ኤርትራ ʾErtrā, Arabic: إرتريا Iritrīyā), officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea is the Italian form of the Greek name Ἐρυθραίᾱ (Erythraíā), meaning "red [land]". The capital is Asmara. It is bordered by Sudan in the west, Ethiopia in the south, and Djibouti in the southeast. The northeast and east of the country has an extensive coastline on the Red Sea, directly across from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The Dahlak Archipelago and several of the Hanish Islands are part of Eritrea. Eritrea's size is approximately 117,600 km² (45,406 sq mi) with an estimated population of 6 million.
Together with northern Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and the Red Sea coast of Sudan, Eritrea is considered the most likely location of the land known to the ancient Egyptians as Punt (or "Ta Netjeru", meaning "God's Land"), whose first mention dates to the 25th century BC. The ancient Puntites were a nation of people that had close relations with Pharaonic Egypt during the times of Pharaoh Sahure and Queen Hatshepsut.

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Ethiopia
Ethiopia ( /ˌiːθiˈoʊpiə/) (Ge'ez: ኢትዮጵያ ʾĪtyōṗṗyā), officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km². Ethiopia is bordered by Eritrea to the north, Djibouti and Somalia to the east, Sudan and South Sudan to the west, and Kenya to the south. With its capital at Addis Ababa, it is also the most populous landlocked nation in the world.
Ethiopia was a monarchy for most of its history, and the Ethiopian dynasty traces its roots to the 2nd century BC. Ethiopia is also one of the oldest sites of human existence known to scientists today, having yielded some of humanity's oldest traces. It may be the region from which Homo sapiens first set out for the Middle East and points beyond. Alongside Rome, Persia, China and India, the Ethiopian Aksum Empire was considered one of the great world powers of the 3rd century. During the Scramble for Africa, Ethiopia was the only African country beside Liberia that retained its sovereignty as a recognized independent country, and was one of only four African members of the League of Nations. After a brief period of Italian occupation, Ethiopia became a charter member of the United Nations. When other African nations received their independence following World War II, many of them adopted the colors of Ethiopia's flag, and Addis Ababa became the location of several international organizations focused on Africa.

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Fiat
Fiat S.p.A., (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino) (Italian Automobile Factory of Turin), is an Italian automobile manufacturer based in Turin. Fiat was founded in 1899 by a group of investors including Giovanni Agnelli. During its more than a century long history, Fiat has also manufactured railway engines and carriages, military vehicles, and aircraft. As of 2009, the Fiat group (not inclusive of its subsidiary Chrysler) was the world's ninth largest carmaker and the largest in Italy.
Fiat-based cars are built around the world. Outside Italy, the largest country of production is Brazil, where the Fiat brand is the market leader. The group also has factories in Argentina and Poland and a long history of licensing production of its products in other countries. It also has numerous alliances and joint ventures around the world, the main ones being located in Italy, France, Turkey, Serbia, India and China.
Agnelli's grandson Gianni Agnelli was Fiat's chairman from 1966 until 1996; he then served as honorary chairman from 1996 until his death on 24 January 2003, during which time Cesare Romiti served as chairman. After their^{[clarification needed]} removal, Paolo Fresco served as chairman and Paolo Cantarella as CEO. Umberto Agnelli then took over as chairman from 2003 to 2004. After Umberto Agnelli's death on 28 May 2004, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo was named chairman, with Agnelli heir John Elkann becoming vice chairman (at the age of 28), and other family members also serving on the board. At this point, CEO Giuseppe Morchio resigned, and Sergio Marchionne was named to replace him on 1 June 2004.

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German Empire
The German Empire (German: Deutsches Kaiserreich) is the common name given to the state officially named the Deutsches Reich (literally: "German Realm"), designating Germany from the unification of Germany and proclamation of Wilhelm I as German Emperor on 18 January 1871, to 1918, when it became a federal republic after defeat in World War I and the abdication of the Emperor, Wilhelm II.
The German Empire consisted of 27 constituent territories (most of them ruled by royal families). While the Kingdom of Prussia contained most of the population and most of the territory of the Reich; the Prussian leadership became supplanted by German leaders and Prussia itself played a lesser role. As Dwyer (2005) points out, Prussia's "political and cultural influence had diminished considerably" by the 1890s. Its three largest neighbors were rivals Imperial Russia to the east and France to the west and ally Austria-Hungary to the south.
After 1850, Germany industrialized rapidly, with a foundation in coal, iron (and later steel), chemicals and railways. From a population of 41 million people in 1871, it grew to 68 million in 1913. From a heavily rural nation in 1815, it was now predominantly urban. During its 47 years of existence, the German Empire operated as an industrial, technological and scientific giant, receiving more Nobel Prizes in science than Britain, France, Russia and the United States combined.

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Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain (Welsh: Prydain Fawr, Scottish Gaelic: Breatainn Mhòr, Cornish: Breten Veur) is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, the largest European island, and the largest of the British Isles. With a population of about 60.0 million people in mid-2009, it is the third most populous island in the world, after Java and Honshū. Great Britain is surrounded by over 1,000 smaller islands and islets. The island of Ireland lies to its west. Politically, Great Britain may also refer to the island itself together with a number of surrounding islands which comprise the territory of England, Scotland and Wales.
All of the island is territory of the sovereign state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and most of the United Kingdom's territory is in Great Britain. Most of England, Scotland, and Wales are on the island of Great Britain, as are their respective capital cities: London, Edinburgh, and Cardiff.

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Istria
Istria (Croatian, Slovene: Istra, Čakavian: Istrija, Jistra, Croatian pronunciation: [îstra]; Italian: Istria; Istriot: Eîstria; German: Istrien; Hungarian: Isztria), formerly Histria (Latin), is the largest peninsula in the Adriatic Sea. The peninsula is located at the head of the Adriatic between the Gulf of Trieste and the Bay of Kvarner. It is shared by three countries: Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy.
The geographical features of Istria include the Učka mountain ridge, which is the highest portion of the Ćićarija mountain range; the rivers Dragonja, Mirna, Pazinčica, and Raša; and the Lim bay and valley. Istria lies in three countries: Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. By far the largest portion (89%) lies in Croatia. "Croatian Istria" is divided into two counties, the larger being Istria County in western Croatia. Important towns in Istria County include Pula, Poreč, Rovinj, Pazin, Labin, Umag, Motovun, Buzet, and Buje. Smaller towns in Istria County include Višnjan, Roč, and Hum.
The northwestern part of Istria lies in Slovenia: it is known as Slovenian Istria, and includes the coastal municipalities of Piran, Izola and Koper, and the Karstic municipality of Hrpelje-Kozina. Northwards of Slovenian Istria, there is a tiny portion of the peninsula that lies in Italy. This smallest portion of Istria consists of the comunes of Muggia and San Dorligo della Valle.

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Italian Empire
The Italian Empire (Italian: Impero Italiano) was created after the Kingdom of Italy joined other European powers in establishing colonies overseas during the "scramble for Africa". Modern Italy as a unified state only existed from 1861. By this time France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands, had already carved out large empires over several hundred years. One of the last remaining areas open to colonisation was on the African continent.
By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Italy had annexed Eritrea and Somalia, and had wrested control of portions of the Ottoman Empire, including Libya, though it was defeated in its attempt to conquer Ethiopia. The Fascist government under Italian dictator Benito Mussolini which came to power in 1922 sought to increase the size of the empire further. Ethiopia was successfully taken, four decades after the previous failure, and Italy's European borders were expanded. An official "Italian Empire" was proclaimed on 9 May 1936 following the conquest of Ethiopia. Italy sided with Nazi Germany during World War II and initially enjoyed successes. However, Allied forces eventually captured Italian overseas colonies and by the time Italy itself was invaded in 1943, its empire had all but ceased to exist.

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Italy
Italy ⁱ/ˈɪtəli/ (Italian: Italia [iˈtaːlja]), officially the Italian Republic or the Republic of Italy (Italian: Repubblica italiana), is a unitary parliamentary republic in south-central Europe. To the north, it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia along the Alps. To the south, it consists of the entirety of the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia–the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea–and many other smaller islands. The independent states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within Italy, while Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland. The territory of Italy covers some 301,338 km² (116,347 sq mi) and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. With 60.6 million inhabitants, it is the fifth most populous country in Europe, and the 23rd most populous in the world.
Rome, the capital of Italy, was for centuries a political and religious centre of Western civilisation as the capital of the Roman Empire and site of the Holy See. After the decline of the Roman Empire, Italy endured numerous invasions by foreign peoples, from Germanic tribes such as the Lombards and Ostrogoths, to the Byzantines and later, the Normans, among others. Centuries later, Italy became the birthplace of Maritime republics and the Renaissance, an immensely fruitful intellectual movement that would prove to be integral in shaping the subsequent course of European thought.

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Libya
Libya (Arabic: ‏ليبيا‎ Lībyā), Berber: ⵍⵉⴱⵢⴰ) is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west.
With an area of almost 1.8 million square kilometres (700,000 sq mi), Libya is the third largest country in Africa by area, and the 17th largest in the world. The largest city, Tripoli, is home to 1.7 million of Libya's 6.4 million people. The three traditional parts of the country are Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyrenaica.
In 2009 Libya had the highest HDI in Africa and the fourth highest GDP (PPP) per capita in Africa, behind Seychelles, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. Libya has the 10th-largest proven oil reserves of any country in the world and the 17th-highest petroleum production.
As a result of the Libyan civil war, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which had at that time been in existence for 34 years, collapsed and Libya entered a period of governance by a transitional administration called the National Transitional Council. The NTC has stated its intention to oversee the first phase of a transition to constitutional democracy, after which it claims it will dissolve in favor of a representative legislature.

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Malta
Malta ⁱ/ˈmɒltə/, officially known as the Republic of Malta (Maltese: Repubblika ta' Malta), is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, 80 km (50 mi) south of Sicily, 284 km (176 mi) east of Tunisia and 333 km (207 mi) north of Libya, with Gibraltar 1,755 km (1,091 mi) to the west and Alexandria 1,508 km (937 mi) to the east. Malta covers just over 316 km² (122 sq mi) in land area, making it one of the world's smallest states. It is also one of the most densely populated countries worldwide. The de facto capital city of Malta is Valletta; the largest town, Birkirkara. The main island comprises many towns, which together form one Larger Urban Zone (LUZ) with a population of 368,250 according to Eurostat. The country has two official languages, Maltese (constitutionally the national language) and English.
Throughout history, Malta's location has given it great strategic importance, and a succession of powers including the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Aragonese, Habsburg Spain, Knights of St John, French and the British ruled the islands. Malta gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1964 and became a republic in 1974, whilst retaining membership in the Commonwealth of Nations. Malta was admitted to the United Nations in 1964 and to the European Union in 2004. Malta is also party to the Schengen Agreement and in 2008 it became part of the eurozone.

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Nazi Germany
The Third Reich, also Nazi Germany, is the common name for Germany when it was a totalitarian state ruled by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). On 30 January 1933 Hitler became chancellor of Germany, quickly eliminating all opposition to rule as sole leader. The state idolized Hitler as its Führer ("leader"), centralizing all power in his hands. Historians have emphasized the hypnotic effect of his rhetoric on large audiences, and of his eyes in small groups. Kessel writes, "Overwhelmingly...Germans speak with mystification of Hitler's 'hypnotic' appeal..." Under the "leader principle", the Führer's word was above all other laws. Top officials reported to Hitler and followed his policies, but they had considerable autonomy. The government was not a coordinated, cooperating body, but rather a collection of factions struggling to amass power and curry favor with the Führer. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazi government restored prosperity and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending and a mixed economy of free-market and central-planning practices. Extensive public works were undertaken, including the construction of the Autobahns. The return to prosperity gave the regime enormous popularity; the suppression of all opposition made Hitler's rule mostly unchallenged.

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Nuremberg Trials
Coordinates: 49°27.2603′N 11°02.9103′E / 49.4543383°N 11.048505°E / 49.4543383; 11.048505 The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany. The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany, in 1945–46, at the Palace of Justice. The first and best known of these trials was the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which tried 25 of the most important captured leaders of the Third Reich, though several key architects of the war (such as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels) had committed suicide before the trials began.
The initial trials were held from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946. The second set of trials of lesser war criminals was conducted under Control Council Law No. 10 at the US Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT); among them included the Doctors' Trial and the Judges' Trial. This article primarily deals with the IMT; see the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials for details on those trials.

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ODESSA
The ODESSA, from the German Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, meaning “Organization of Former SS Members,” is believed to have been an international Nazi network set up toward the end of World War II by a group of SS officers. The purpose of the ODESSA was to establish and facilitate secret escape routes, later known as ratlines, to allow SS members to avoid their capture and prosecution for war crimes. Most of those fleeing out of Germany and Austria were helped to South America and the Middle East.
Several books by those involved in the War Crimes Commission (including T.H. Tetens and Joseph Wechsberg) have verified the organization's existence and provided details of its operations. Wechsberg studied Simon Wiesenthal's memoirs on the ODESSA and verified them with his own experiences in the book The Murderers Among Us.
In a note, persons claiming to represent the ODESSA claimed responsibility for a 9 July 1979 car bombing in France, which was aimed at anti-Nazi activists Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.^{[citation needed]}

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Pula
Pula (pronounced [pǔːla]; Latin: Colonia Pietas Iulia Pola Pollentia Herculanea; Italian: Pola; Istro-Romanian: Pola; Chakavian: Pulj, German: Polei, Slovene: Pulj) is the largest city in Istria County, Croatia, situated at the southern tip of the Istria peninsula, with a population of 62,080 (2006). Like the rest of the region, it is known for its mild climate, smooth sea, and unspoiled nature. The city has a long tradition of winemaking, fishing, shipbuilding, and tourism. Pula has also been Istria's administrative center since ancient Roman times.
Pula is the largest city in Istria county, with a metropolitan area of 90,000 people. The city itself has 62,080 residents (2005), while the metropolitan area includes Barban (2,802 residents), Fažana (3,050 residents), Ližnjan (2,945 residents), Marčana (3,903 residents), Medulin (6,004 residents), Svetvinčenat (2,218 residents) and Vodnjan (5,651 residents).
Its population density is 1,093.27 inhabitants per square kilometre (2,831.6 /sq mi), ranking Pula fifth in Croatia.

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Rijeka
Rijeka (Croatian: Rijeka, Croatian pronunciation: [rijɛ̌ːka]; Italian: Fiume) is the principal seaport and the third largest city in Croatia (after Zagreb and Split). It is located on Kvarner Bay, an inlet of the Adriatic Sea and has a population of 128,735 inhabitants (2011). The conurbation, which includes adjacent towns and municipalities of Opatija, Lovran, Mošćenička Draga, Matulji, Kastav, Viškovo, Klana, Kostrena, Čavle, Jelenje, Bakar, and Kraljevica has a population of 213,842 (2011).
Historically, because of its strategic position and its excellent deep-water Port of Rijeka, the city was fiercely contested, especially between Italy, Hungary, and Croatia, changing hands and demographics many times over centuries. According to the 2001 census data, the overwhelming majority of its citizens (80.39%) are Croats, with Serbs coming in second (6.21%). The Croatian, Slovene and Italian version of the city's name mean river in each of the languages.
Rijeka is the center of Primorje-Gorski Kotar County in Croatia. The city's economy largely depends on shipbuilding (shipyards "3. Maj" and "Viktor Lenac") and maritime transport. Rijeka hosts the Croatian National Theatre "Ivan pl. Zajc", first built in 1765, as well as the University of Rijeka, founded in 1973 but with roots dating back to 1632.

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San Marino
San Marino, officially the Republic of San Marino (ⁱ/sæn məˈriːnoʊ/ san-mə-REE-noh; Italian: Repubblica di San Marino) and also known as the Most Serene Republic of San Marino (Italian: Serenissima Repubblica di San Marino), is a state situated on the Italian Peninsula on the eastern side of the Apennine Mountains. It is an enclave surrounded by Italy. Its size is just over 61 km² (24 sq mi) with an estimated population of over 30,000. Its capital is the City of San Marino. San Marino has the smallest population of all the members of the Council of Europe.
San Marino is the oldest surviving sovereign state and constitutional republic in the world, as the continuation of the monastic community founded on 3 September 301, by stonecutter Marinus of Rab. Legend has it that Marinus left Rab, then the Roman colony of Arba, in 257 when the future emperor, Diocletian, issued a decree calling for the reconstruction of the city walls of Rimini, which had been destroyed by Liburnian pirates.
The constitution of San Marino, enacted in 1600, is the world's oldest constitution still in effect. The country's economy mainly relies on finance, industry, services and tourism. It is one of the wealthiest countries in the world in terms of GDP (per capita), with a figure comparable to some of the more developed Italian regions, such as Lombardy and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. San Marino is considered to have a highly stable economy, with one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe, no national debt and a budget surplus.

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Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel (German pronunciation: [ˈʃʊtsʃtafəl] ( listen), translated to Protection Squadron or defence corps, abbreviated SS—or with stylized "Armanen" sig runes) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II (1939–1945). After 1945, the SS was banned in Germany, along with the Nazi Party, as a criminal organization.
The SS began as a small permanent guard unit made up of NSDAP volunteers to provide security for Nazi Party meetings in Munich. Formed at the end of 1920, they were known as the "Saal-Schutz" (Hall-Protection). Later under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler between 1929 and 1945, the SS was renamed the "Schutz-Staffel" and grew from a small paramilitary formation to one of the largest and most powerful organizations in the Third Reich.
The SS grew from a small paramilitary unit to a powerful force that served as the Führer's "Praetorian Guard", the Nazi Party's "Protection Squadron" and a force that, fielding almost a million men (both on the front lines and as political police), managed to exert as much political influence in the Third Reich as the Wehrmacht (Germany's regular armed forces).

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Slovenia
Slovenia (ⁱ/sloʊˈviːniə/ sloh-VEE-nee-ə, Slovene: Slovenija), officially the Republic of Slovenia (Republika Slovenija, [reˈpublika sloˈveːnija]) is a Slavic nation state, situated in South-Central Europe, at the crossroad of main European cultural and trade routes. It borders Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Croatia to the south and southeast, and Hungary to the northeast. It covers 20,273 square kilometres (7,827 sq mi) and has a population of 2.05 million. It is a parliamentary republic, member of the European Union and NATO. Relative to its geography, history, economy, culture, and language, it is a very diverse country distinguished by a transitional character. It is characterised by a high economic and social level. Its capital and largest city is Ljubljana.
The territory of Slovenia is mainly hilly or mountainous and has an exceptionally high landscape and biological diversity and a mosaic structure, which are a result of natural attributes and the long-lasting presence of humans. Four major European geographic units interweave here: the Alps, the Dinaric Alps, the Mediterranean, with a small portion of coastline along the Adriatic Sea, and the Pannonian Plain. The climate is temperate and significantly influenced by the variety of territory, with a strong interaction of the continental climate, the sub-Mediterranean climate and Alpine climate across most of the country. The country is one of the water-richest in Europe, with a dense river network, a rich aquifer system, and significant karstic underground watercourses. Over half of the territory is covered by forest.

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Somalia
Somalia ( /soʊˈmɑːliə/ soh-MAH-lee-ə; Somali: Soomaaliya; Arabic: الصومال‎ aṣ-Ṣūmāl), officially the Somali Republic (Somali: Jamhuuriyadda Soomaaliya, Arabic: جمهورية الصومال‎ Jumhūriyyat aṣ-Ṣūmāl) and formerly known as the Somali Democratic Republic under Socialist rule, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. Since the outbreak of the Somali Civil War in 1991 there has been no central government control over most of the country's territory. The internationally recognized Transitional Federal Government controls only a small part of the country. Somalia has been characterized as a failed state and is one of the poorest and most violent states in the world.
Somalia lies in the easternmost part of Africa. It is bordered by Djibouti to the northwest, Kenya to the southwest, the Gulf of Aden with Yemen to the north, the Indian Ocean to the east, and Ethiopia to the west. It has the longest coastline on the continent, and its terrain consists mainly of plateaus, plains and highlands. Hot conditions prevail year-round, along with periodic monsoon winds and irregular rainfall.

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Sturmabteilung
The Sturmabteilung (SA) (German pronunciation: [ˈʃtʊʁmʔapˌtaɪlʊŋ] ( listen);Storm Detachment or Assault Division) or Brownshirts) functioned as the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. It played a key role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Their main assignments were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies; the disruption of opposing political parties and the fight against their paramilitary units (esp. the Rotfrontkämpferbund); and the intimidation of Jewish citizens (eg. the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses).
The SA was the first Nazi paramilitary group to develop pseudo-military titles for bestowal upon its members. The SA ranks were adopted by several other Nazi Party groups, chief amongst them the SS, itself originally a branch of the SA. SA men were often called "brownshirts" for the colour of their uniforms (similar to Benito Mussolini's blackshirts). Brown-coloured shirts were chosen as the SA uniform because a large batch of them were cheaply available after World War I, having originally been ordered during the war for colonial troops posted to Germany's former African colonies.

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Treviso
Treviso (Italian pronunciation: [treˈviːzo] ( listen), Venetian: Trevixo) is a city and comune in Veneto, northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Treviso and the municipality has 82,854 inhabitants (as of November 2010): some 3,000 live within the Venetian walls (le Mura) or in the historical and monumental center, some 80,000 live in the urban center proper, while the city hinterland has a population of approximately 170,000. The city is home to the headquarters of clothing retailer Benetton, appliance maker De'Longhi, and bicycle maker Pinarello.
For some scholars, the ancient city of Tarvisium derived its name from a settlement of the Celtic tribe of the Taurusci. Others have attributed the name instead to the Greek root tarvos, meaning "bull".
Tarvisium, then a city of the Veneti, became a municipium in 89 BC after the Romans added Cisalpine Gaul to their dominions. Citizens were ascribed to the Roman tribe of Claudia. The city lay in proximity of the Via Postumia, which connected Opitergium to Aquileia, two major cities of Roman Venetia during Ancient and Early Medieval times. Treviso is rarely mentioned by ancient writers, although Pliny writes of the Silis, that is the Sile River, as flowing ex montibus Tarvisanis.

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Vatican City
Vatican City ⁱ/ˈvætɨkən ˈsɪti/, or Vatican City State, in Italian officially Stato della Città del Vaticano (pronounced [ˈstaːto della t͡ʃitˈta del vatiˈkaːno]), is a landlocked sovereign city-state whose territory consists of a walled enclave within the city of Rome, Italy. It has an area of approximately 44 hectares (110 acres), and a population of just over 800. This makes Vatican City the smallest independent state in the world by both area and population.
Vatican City State was established in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty, signed by Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri, on behalf of Pope Pius XI and by Prime Minister and Head of Government Benito Mussolini on behalf of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy. Vatican City State is distinct from the Holy See, which dates back to early Christianity and is the main episcopal see of 1.2 billion Latin and Eastern Catholic adherents around the globe. Ordinances of Vatican City are published in Italian; official documents of the Holy See are issued mainly in Latin. The two entities have distinct passports: the Holy See, not being a country, issues only diplomatic and service passports, whereas Vatican City State issues normal passports. In each case very few passports are issued.

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Yemen
The Republic of Yemen (Arabic: الجمهورية اليمنية‎ al-Jumhūrīyah al-Yamanīyah), commonly known as Yemen ⁱ/ˈjɛmən/ (Arabic: اليَمَن‎ al-Yaman), is a country located in Western Asia, occupying the southwestern to southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, and Oman to the east. Yemen is considered one of the poorest countries in the Arab world. Its capital and largest city is Sana'a. Yemen's territory includes over 200 islands, the largest of which is Socotra, about 415 km (258 mi) to the south of mainland Yemen, off the coast of Somalia. It is the only state in the Arabian Peninsula to have a purely republican form of government. Approximately 53% of Yemenis are Sunnis, while 45% are Zaydi Shias.
One etymology derives Yemen from yamin, meaning "on the right side", as the south is on the right when facing the sunrise. Another derives Yemen from yumn, meaning "felicity", as the region is fertile. The Romans called it Arabia Felix (Happy Arabia) as opposed to Arabia Deserta (Deserted Arabia), which was their term for northern Arabia.

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Abba Ahimeir
Abba Ahimeir (Hebrew: אב"א אחימאיר‎, 2 November 1897 - 6 June 1962) was a Russian-born Jewish journalist, historian and political activist. One of the ideologues of Revisionist Zionism, he was the founder of the Revisionist Maximalist faction of the Zionist Revisionist Movement (ZRM) and of the clandestine Brit HaBirionim.
Abba Shaul Geisinovich (later Abba Ahimeir) was born in Dolgi, a village near Babruysk in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus). From 1912-1914, he attended the Herzliya Gymnasium high school in Tel Aviv. While with his family in Babruysk for summer vacation in 1914, World War I broke out and he was forced to complete his studies in Russia. In 1917, he participated in the Russian Zionist Conference in Petrograd and underwent agricultural training as part of Joseph Trumpeldor’s HeHalutz movement in Batum, Caucasia to prepare him for a life as a pioneer in the Land of Israel. In 1920, he left Russia and changed his name from Gaisinovich to Ahimeir (in Hebrew: Meir’s brother) in memory of his brother Meir who had fallen in battle that year fighting against Poles during a pogrom.

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Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] ( listen); 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany (as Führer und Reichskanzler) from 1934 to 1945. Hitler is commonly associated with the rise of fascism in Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust.
A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, precursor of the Nazi Party, in 1919, and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup d'état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in Munich. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anticommunism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After his appointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. His aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe.

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Alberto de Stefani
Alberto De Stefani (1879–1969) was an Italian politician. Coming from a background in liberalism to Benito Mussolini's fascism, De Stefani was in charge of Italian economics from 1922 to 1925. His time in charge was characterized by laissez-faire ideals.
De Stefani was appointed by Mussolini in 1922 as the finance minister. He was a liberal economist and so favoured policies such as free-trade, lowering taxes without too much government interference and privatisation of businesses such as the communications industry. He also undertook a thorough reform of the taxation system in Italy which was adjudged a success at the time, although it has been noted that the reforms he enacted had been laid out by his predecessor Filippo Meda but not enacted. De Stefani took advantage of the dictatorial powers afforded to Mussolini's regmie to enact these reforms, which had previously been blocked by parliament.
The economy prospered under de Stefani's direction, as part of a Europe-wide growth, although wages also fell under his direction. He accomplished his goal of a balanced budget for the financial year 1924-25. By mid 1925 however the economy was heading towards crisis and Mussolini dismissed de Stefani, replacing him with the corporatism Giuseppe Volpi.

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Alexander the Great
Alexander III of Macedon (20/21 July 356 – 10/11 June 323 BC), commonly known as Alexander the Great (Greek: Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μέγας, Aléxandros ho Mégas from the Greek αλέξω alexo "to defend, help" + ανήρ aner "man"), was a king of Macedon, a state in northern ancient Greece. Born in Pella in 356 BC, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle until the age of 16. By the age of thirty, he had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world, stretching from the Ionian Sea to the Himalayas. He was undefeated in battle and is considered one of history's most successful commanders.
Alexander succeeded his father, Philip II of Macedon, to the throne in 336 BC after Philip was assassinated. Upon Philip's death, Alexander inherited a strong kingdom and an experienced army. He was awarded the generalship of Greece and used this authority to launch his father's military expansion plans. In 334 BC, he invaded Persian-ruled Asia Minor and began a series of campaigns that lasted ten years. Alexander broke the power of Persia in a series of decisive battles, most notably the battles of Issus and Gaugamela. He subsequently overthrew the Persian King Darius III and conquered the entirety of the Persian Empire. At that point, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River.

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Alfred Haighton
Coenraad Alfred Augustus Haighton (born Rotterdam, October 26, 1896 - died Beekbergen, April 13, 1943) was a millionaire businessman and the leader of the Netherlands' first fascist movement.
From a privileged background, Haighton was well educated, studying in Los Angeles and producing a thesis on Arthur Schopenhauer, although he was also physically disabled for his entire life. Haighton's father had been a highly successful businessman, making a fortune in particular from his lottery insurance business LOTISICO. He died early and as such Alfred Haighton inherited the highly profitable business, allowing him to devote much of his time to politics. He soon became close to H.A. Sinclair de Rochemont and in 1924 the two set up the Verbond van Actualisten, a group which looked for inspiration to Italian fascism. The group broke down in 1927 and Haighton then put his money into a journal, De Bezem and eventually his own movement, the Fascistische Jongeren Bond. This movement was deplted in 1932 when his close ally Jan Baars broke from him to set up the General Dutch Fascist League (ANFB).

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Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Ernst Rosenberg (help·info) (12 January 1893 – 16 October 1946) was an early and intellectually influential member of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart; he later held several important posts in the Nazi government. He is considered one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory, persecution of the Jews, Lebensraum, abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to "degenerate" modern art. He is also known for his rejection of Christianity, having played an important role in the development of Positive Christianity, which he intended to be transitional to a new Nazi faith. At Nuremberg he was tried, sentenced to death and executed by hanging as a war criminal.
Rosenberg was born in 1893 in Reval (today's Tallinn, in Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire) to a family of Baltic Germans: his father, Waldemar Wilhelm Rosenberg, was a wealthy merchant from Latvia, his mother, Elfriede, was from Estonia. (Tallinn archivist J. Rajandi claimed in the 1930s that Rosenberg's family had Estonian origins).

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Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Alfred Sohn-Rethel (4 January 1899 – 6 April 1990) was a Marxist economist and philosopher especially interested in epistemology. He also wrote about the relationship of German industry with national socialism.
Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, Sohn-Rethel came from a family of painters and his father was a painter too. His mother came from the Oppenheim family and had influential relations with big business.
As his family did not want him also to become a painter, he was brought up by his uncle, the steel industrialist Ernst Poensgen. On Christmas 1915 he expressed a wish for a copy of Karl Marx Capital as a present. He received one and studied it intensively. Thrown out of home, he participated in the anti-war student protest in his first year at Heidelberg University in 1917.
From 1920 Sohn-Rethel was a friend of the philosopher Ernst Bloch, and he met Walter Benjamin in 1921. He came to live in Positano in 1923-4, and Naples: philosophy of the broken recorded his fascination with the relaxed Neopolitan attitude to technology. Between 1924 and 1927 he remained in Italy, "mainly in Capri, where Benjamin and Bloch were staying", meeting Adorno and Kracauer also at Capri in 1924. He stayed in contact with different members of the Frankfurt School, to whom his theoretical concerns were close. However, they never established a close working relationship because Horkheimer was afraid of social theory becoming too speculative.

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Amerigo Dumini
Amerigo Dumini (August 27, 1894 – December 25, 1967) was an American-born Italian fascist activist who led the group responsible for the 1924 assassination of United Socialist Party leader Giacomo Matteotti.
Born in St. Louis, the son of Italian immigrants to the United States, Amerigo Dumini traveled to the family's ancestral region, Florence, at the end of the First World War and became active in the local fascio organized by partisans of Benito Mussolini, taking pride in being referred to as "sicario del Duce" ("Il Duce's hitman"). He participated in the Sarzana incident on 21 July 1921, leading a column of 600 "squadristi" (Blackshirts) to Sarzana with demands for the liberation of Renato Ricci. Ricci and other fascists had been arrested following armed confrontation with the Arditi del Popolo, an antifascist organization created in 1921 by the anarchist Argo Secondari as an offshoot of the "Arditi" movement.
In 1924 Dumini entered the ranks of Ceka, the secret police which Mussolini based on the Soviet Cheka. Shortly thereafter, on June 24, he headed the group that carried out the killing of Giacomo Matteotti, possibly on the orders of Cesare Rossi, to whom he was assistant at the time. Following the political murder, he was abandoned by the Fascist leadership, with the exception of Roberto Farinacci, who defended him during his trial. While Farinacci declared himself "honored" by the task, he could not prevent Dumini from receiving a five-year prison sentence, of which he only served eleven months, benefitting from an amnesty ordered by Mussolini.

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Anastasy Vonsyatsky
Anastasy Andreyevich Vonsyatsky (Russian: Анастасий Андреевич Вонсяцкий; June 12, 1898 - February 5, 1965), better known in the United States as Anastase Andreivitch Vonsiatsky, was a Russian anti-Bolshevik émigré and fascist leader based in the United States since the 1920s.
A naturalized American citizen while leading a splinter far-right organization, the Russian National Revolutionary Labor and Workers Peasant Party of Fascists. The headquarters RFO based on Putnam, Connecticut. Vonsyatsky was charged with the support of secret contacts with agents of Nazi Germany's and arrested by the FBI in 1942, following the United States' entry into war with Germany and Japan.
Released early from prison in 1945, Vonsyatsky lived out the remainder of his life in the United States. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1965.
Anastasy Andreyevich Vonsyatsky was born in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire) to a privileged Russian family known for its long devotion to the Russian czars; one of Vonsyatsky's great-grandparents had been handed a titled estated from the Romanovs.

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Ante Pavelić
Ante Pavelić (14 July 1889 – 28 December 1959) was a Croatian fascist leader and revolutionary. As Poglavnik, he ruled the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. He was founder and leader of the Croatian fascist movement Ustaše.
Pavelić was a lawyer and politician in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia known for his nationalistic beliefs, particularly about an independent Croatia. From 1927 until 1929, he was a member of the Yugoslav Parliament where he declared his beliefs about Croatian independence. In 1920s he radicalized his political activity and called on Croats to revolt against Yugoslavia.
After King Alexander I declared his 6 January Dictatorship Pavelić escaped to Vienna, where he established contact with Croatian political émigrés and formed a link with the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization in advocating independence for Croatia and Macedonia. He then moved to Italy where he founded the Ustaše (Croatian Revolutionary Movement); initially, this was a Croatian nationalist movement with the goal of creating an independent Greater Croatia via armed revolt. In October 1934 he planned the assassination of King Alexander I and spent time in prison in Italy until 1936. From 1936 until 1939, Italian authorities banned Ustaše, so he dissolved the group. He lived under police watch, eventually seeking German support but without success. After 1939 he was active again, focusing mainly on Ustaše activity in Yugoslavia.

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Arnold Leese
Arnold Spencer Leese (1878–1956) was a British veterinarian and fascist politician. He was born in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, England and educated at Giggleswick School.
After qualifying as a veterinary surgeon, he accepted a post in British India, where he became an expert on the camel. He had previously worked in the East End of London. He worked there for six years before becoming Camel Specialist for the East Africa Protectorate of the British Empire. He would remain an animal lover and teetotaller throughout his life.
He published numerous articles on the camel and its maladies, the first appearing in The Journal of Tropical Veterinary Science in 1909. He had the honour of a camel parasite being named after him: Thelazia leesei.
He joined the Royal Army Veterinary Corps of the British Army at the start of World War I and served on the Western Front and the Middle East. Captain Leese returned to England where he continued his practice, retiring and publishing A Treatise on the One-Humped Camel in Health and in Disease (1927), which would remain a standard work in India for fifty years.

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Arthur Fonjallaz
Arthur Fonjallaz (January 2, 1875-January 24, 1944) was a Swiss military figure, publisher and fascist.
The son of a vineyard owner from Lausanne (he was born in nearby Prilly) he attended the Military Academy in Modena and pursued a successful career in the Swiss Army, achieving the highest peace time rank of brigadier general whilst commanding the 4th Infantry Brigade.
Fonjallaz took an early interest in politics, although his ideas were ill-defined as he was both a radical and an admirer of Enrico Corradini, whilst also becoming involved in an agrarian progentior of the Swiss People's Party. Leaving the party in 1932, he took up a post as principal of military sciences and war history at the École Polytechnique Féderal in Zürich Colonel Fonjallaz was, however, relieved of his duties in 1933 after it came to light that he had been a member of the governing board of the fascistic Heimatwehr as well as the National Front, both of which were noted for their virulent anti-Semitism.
The wealthy Fonjallaz then set up Helvetic Action Against Secret Societies which was particularly geared towards opposing Freemasonry. Taking advantage of the initiative process, Fonjallaz attempted to pass an amendment to the Swiss Federal Constitution banning the practice, but this was defeated in 1937.

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Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce (Italian pronunciation: [beneˈdetto ˈkroːtʃe]; February 25, 1866 – November 20, 1952) was an Italian idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, methodology of history writing and aesthetics, and was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade. He had considerable influence on other prominent Italian intellectuals including both marxist Antonio Gramsci and fascist Giovanni Gentile.
Croce was born in Pescasseroli in the Abruzzo region of Italy. He came from an influential and wealthy family, and was raised in a very strict Catholic environment. Around the age of 16, he turned away from Catholicism and developed a personal view of spiritual life, in which religion cannot be anything but an historical institution where the creative strength of mankind can be expressed. He kept this position for the rest of his life.
In 1883, an earthquake hit the village of Casamicciola, Ischia island, near Naples, where he was on holiday with his family, destroying the home they lived in. His mother, father, and only sister were all killed, while he was buried for a very long time and barely survived. After the incident he inherited his family's fortune and much like Schopenhauer before him was able to live the rest of his life in relative leisure, enabling him to devote a great deal of time to philosophy as an independent intellectual writing from his palazzo in Naples. (Ryn, 2000:xi).

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Benito Mussolini
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") 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.

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Cesare Mori
Cesare Mori (Pavia, December 22, 1871 – Udine, July 6, 1942) was a prefect (prefetto) before and during the Fascist period in Italy. He is known in Italy as the Iron Prefect (Prefetto di Ferro) because of his iron-fisted campaigns against the Mafia on Sicily in the second half of the 1920s.
Mori was born in Pavia and grew up in an orphananage and was only recognised by his natural parents in October 1879 at the age of seven. He studied at the Turin Military Academy. However, he married a girl, Angelina Salvi, who did not have the dowry stipulated by military regulations of the time, and had to resign. He joined the police, serving first in Ravenna, then Castelvetrano in the province of Trapani (Sicily) – where he made his name capturing the bandit Paolo Grisalfi – before moving to Florence in 1915 as vice-quaestor.
At the end of the First World War, the situation of Sicilian criminality got worse when war veterans joined gangs of bandits. In 1919 Mori was sent back to Sicily as the head of special forces against brigandage. In his roundups, Mori distinguished himself for his energetic and radical methods. At Caltabellotta he arrested more than 300 people in one night. The press wrote of a "lethal blow to the Mafia", but Mori said to a member of his staff :

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Charlemagne
Charlemagne ( /ˈʃɑrlɨmeɪn/ or /ˈʃɑrləmeɪn/; French pronunciation: [ʃaʁ.lə.maɲ]; c. 742 – 28 January 814), also known as Charles the Great (Latin: Carolus Magnus or Karolus Magnus), was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans (Imperator Romanorum) from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned Imperator Augustus by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800 in Rome.
His rule is also associated with the Carolingian Renaissance, a revival of art, religion, and culture through the medium of the Catholic Church. Through his foreign conquests and internal reforms, Charlemagne helped define both Western Europe and the European Middle Ages. He is numbered as Charles I in the regnal lists of Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, and France.
The son of King Pepin the Short and Bertrada of Laon, a Frankish queen, he succeeded his father in 768 and was initially co-ruler with his brother Carloman I. It has often been suggested that the relationship between Charlemagne and Carloman was not good, but it has also been argued that tensions were exaggerated by Carolingian chroniclers.

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Croats
Croats (Croatian: Hrvati) are a South Slavic ethnic group mostly living in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and nearby countries. There are around 4 million Croats living inside Croatia and up to 4.5 million throughout the rest of the world. Responding to political, social and economic pressure, many Croats have migrated throughout the world, and established a notable Croatian diaspora. Large Croat communities exists in The United States, Chile, Argentina, Germany, Austria, Australia, Peru, Canada, Serbia, New Zealand and South Africa. Croats are noted for their culture, which has been influenced by a number of other neighbouring cultures through the ages. The strongest influences came from Central Europe and the Mediterranean where, at the same time, Croats have made their own contribution. The Croats are predominantly Catholic with minor groups of Protestants, Muslims, Orthodox, Jews and secular non religious atheists and agnostics. Their language is Croatian.
Croatia is the nation state of the Croats, while in the adjacent Bosnia and Herzegovina they are one of the three constituent peoples alongside Bosniaks and Serbs.

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Daniel Guérin
Daniel Guérin (19 May 1904, Paris – 14 April 1988, Suresnes) was a French anarcho-communist author, best known for his work Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as his collection No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism in which he collected writings on the idea and movement it inspired, from the first writings of Max Stirner in the mid-19th century through the first half of the 20th century. He is also known for his opposition to Nazism, fascism, Stalinism and colonialism, in addition to his support for the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the Spanish Civil War, and his revolutionary defence of free love and homosexuality (he was bisexual).
Early on, he started political activism in the revolutionary syndicalist magazine La Révolution prolétarienne of Pierre Monatte. He traveled to Lebanon (1927–1929) and French Indochina (1929–1930) and became a passionate opponent of colonial ventures. In 1932, he joined the Confédération Générale du Travail, a syndicalist trade union; in the mid-1930s, he entered Marceau Pivert's movement Gauche Révolutionnaire ("Revolutionary Left"), a current of the SFIO Party. When the Gauche was excluded from the SFIO, he became one of the leaders of the new Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan (PSOP - "Workers and Peasants Socialist Party"), and was at that time quite close to Leon Trotsky.

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Denis Mack Smith
Denis Mack Smith CBE FBA FRSL (born 3 March 1920 in London) is an English historian, specialising in the history of Italy from the Risorgimento onwards. He is best known for studies of Garibaldi and Cavour and of Mussolini, and for his single-volume Modern Italy: A Political History. He was named Grand Official of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1996.

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Dimitrije Ljotić
Dimitrije Ljotić (Serbian Cyrillic: Димитрије Љотић; August 12, 1891, Belgrade - April 23, 1945, Ajdovščina) was a Serbian fascist politician and Nazi German collaborationist during World War II.
Although born in Belgrade he spent most of his life in Smederevo. His Serbian ancestors came to Serbia from the village of Blace in what is today Greek Macedonia during the first half of 19th century. His father Vladimir Ljotić had a notable political and diplomatic career during which he was a consul in Thessaloniki, mayor of Smederevo and a Member of Parliament in the Serbian Parliament. Dimitrije started his education in Smederevo, before going on to graduate at the age of 16 from the Serbian lycée in Thesaloniki, and concluding his education by graduating at the University of Belgrade's Law School.
During the Balkan wars he volunteered for military medical service. In 1913 he stayed in Paris where he remained until the beginning of World War I; soon after he returned to Serbia and enlisted in the Serbian Army. After the Great War he served as commander of a railway station in Bakar, Croatia where he broke a railway strike arresting 36 workers. This event proved crucial in his life and career since it determined his choice to become a politician rather than a clergyman. In Bakar he met his wife Ivka, with whom he moved back to Smederevo in 1920 and started practicing law. In Smederevo he joined the People's Radical Party soon becoming president of the Youth branch. In 1931 King Alexander I proclaimed him Minister of Justice in the government of Petar Živković, in which capacity he would make a new draft Constitution and present it to the King. He proposed voters should vote in free and secret elections whilst candidates would be nominated by non-governmental organizations. The King refused his proposal and Ljotić resigned from office.

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Enrico Corradini
Enrico Corradini (July 20, 1865 — December 10, 1931) was an Italian novelist, essayist, journalist and nationalist political figure.
Corradini was born near Montelupo Fiorentino, Tuscany.
A follower of Gabriele D'Annunzio, he founded the right-wing newspaper Il Regno (1903-1905), together with intellectuals Giovanni Papini, Vilfredo Pareto, and Giuseppe Prezzolini. It quickly became a staple for irredentist and radical thought that was to blend into Fascism. In 1910, the Italian Nationalist Association (Associazione Nazionalista Italiana, ANI) was founded with the participation of Corradini, who was among the leaders. It made a name for itself after giving full support to Italian imperialism and the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 - Corradini wrote two political essays on the matter (Il volere d'Italia - "Italy's Desire", and L'ora di Tripoli - "Tripoli's Moment"). He expanded such bellicose theories in the weekly L'Idea Nazionale, founded by him together with Alfredo Rocco and Luigi Federzoni.

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Eoin O'Duffy
Eoin O'Duffy (Irish: Eoin Ó Dubhthaigh; 30 October 1892 – 30 November 1944) was in succession a Teachta Dála (TD), the Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the second Commissioner of the Garda Síochána, leader of the Army Comrades Association and then the first leader of Fine Gael (1933–34), before leading the Irish Brigade to fight for Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. He once proclaimed himself the "third most important man in Europe" after Adolf Hitler and fellow fascist Benito Mussolini.
Eoin O'Duffy was born Owen O'Duffy in Lough Egish, near Castleblayney, County Monaghan. O'Duffy did an apprenticeship as an engineer in Wexford before working as an engineer and architect in Monaghan. In 1919 he became an auctioneer. O'Duffy was a leading member of the Gaelic Athletic Association in Ulster in the 1910s. A stand in a ground in Clones, County Monaghan, is named after him.
In 1917 O'Duffy joined the Irish Volunteers and took an active part in the Irish War of Independence. In February 1920, he (along with Ernie O'Malley) was involved in the first capture of a Royal Irish Constabulary barracks by the IRA in Ballytrain, in his native Monaghan. He came to the attention of Michael Collins, who enrolled him into the Irish Republican Brotherhood and supported his advancement in the Nationalist hierarchy.

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Ferenc Szálasi
Ferenc Szálasi (Szálasi Ferenc in Hungarian, Hungarian pronunciation: [saːlaʃi fɛrɛnts]) (6 January 1897 – 12 March 1946) was the leader of the National Socialist Arrow Cross Party – Hungarist Movement, the "Leader of the Nation" (Nemzetvezető), being both Head of State and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Hungary's "Government of National Unity" (Nemzeti Összefogás Kormánya) for the final three months of Hungary's participation in World War II. During his brief rule, Szálasi's men murdered 10–15,000 Jews. After the war, he was executed by the Soviets for crimes against the state.
Born the son of a soldier in Kassa (now Košice in Slovakia) of mixed Armenian (the surname of his great-grandfather was Saloshyan), German, Hungarian (one grandparent), Slovak and Rusyn heritage.
Szálasi followed in his father's footsteps and joined the army at a young age. He eventually became an officer and served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. Upon the dissolution and break-up of Austria-Hungary after the war, the Hungarian Democratic Republic and then the Hungarian Soviet Republic were briefly proclaimed in 1918 and 1919 respectively. The short-lived communist government of Béla Kun launched what was known as the "Red Terror" and ultimately involved Hungary in an ill-fated war with Romania. In 1920, the country went into a period of civil conflict with Hungarian anti-communists and monarchists violently purging the nation of communists, leftist intellectuals, and others they felt threatened by, especially Jews. This period was known as the "White Terror" and, in 1920, after the pullout of the last of the Romanian occupation forces, it led to the restoration of the Kingdom of Hungary (Magyar Királyság).

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Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, better known under the name of Franco, (Spanish: [fɾanˈθisko ˈfɾaŋko]; 4 December 1892 – 20 November 1975) was a Spanish general, dictator and the leader of the Nationalist military rebellion in the Spanish Civil War, and totalitarian head of state of Spain, from October 1936 (as a unified nation from 1939 onwards) until his death in November 1975. He came to power while recognizing the principles of the far-right Falange movement, although this was for propaganda reasons, as he belonged to no political party before becoming Head of State. As head of state, Franco used the titles Caudillo de España and Generalísimo, but also was called formally as His Excellency, The Head of State.
Franco was from a military family, and although originally intent on entering the Spanish Navy, he instead became a soldier. He participated in the Rif War in Morocco, becoming the youngest general in Europe by 1926. After returning to the Spanish mainland, he saw service suppressing an anarchist-led strike in 1934, defending the stability of Alcalá-Zamora's conservative government. Following the formation of a Popular Front government, made up of various left-wing factions, instability heightened. Violence between militant groups rose sharply with assassination of conservative parliamentary leader José Calvo Sotelo, in retaliation for the killing of José Castillo. Franco and his co-conspirators used Calvo's death as their pretext for war, as they had already initiated the plan for their rebellion.

wn.com/Francisco_Franco
Fumimaro Konoe
Prince Fumimaro Konoe (近衛文麿, Konoe Fumimaro^?, often Konoye, October 12, 1891 – December 16, 1945) was a politician in the Empire of Japan who served as the 34th, 38th and 39th Prime Minister of Japan and founder/leader of the Taisei Yokusankai.
Prince Fumimaro Konoe was born into the ancient Fujiwara clan, and was the heir of the princely Konoe family in Tokyo. This was a highly prestigious Japanese family, so lofty that the older and more powerful noble, Saionji Kinmochi, addressed the young student as "your Excellency" when he first met him. The Prince received a broad education, acquiring both German and English. He was particularly drawn to Socialist writings, he studied socialist philosopher Hajime Kawakami, and at age 23 translated and published Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
Konoe’s father, Atsumaro, had been politically active, having organized the Anti-Russia Society in 1903. Atsumaro had been considered a potential candidate for Prime Minister, but died in 1904. That left Konoe with the title of Prince, plenty of social standing but not much money, and plenty of room for a mentor/father-figure. That mentor was Saionji. Even so, Konoe never fully embraced his mentor’s pro-Western attitudes.

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Gabriele d'Annunzio
Gabriele D'Annunzio or d'Annunzio (ennobled by the King of Italy in 1924 as Principe di Montenevoso; Italian pronunciation: [ɡabriˈɛːle danˈnuntsjo]; 12 March 1863 – 1 March 1938) was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist, dramatist, and soldier during World War I. He was a prominent Italian nationalist figure. His role in politics is controversial due to his influence on the Italian Fascist movement and his status as the alleged forerunner of Benito Mussolini.
D'Annunzio was of Dalmatian extraction. He was born in Pescara, Abruzzo, the son of a wealthy landowner and mayor of the town whose name was originally Francesco Rapagnetta, to which both father and son legally added D'Annunzio. The son was baptized Gaetano and gained the name of Gabriele as a nickname in childhood, from his angelic looks. His precocious talent was recognised early in life, and he was sent to school at the Liceo Cicognini in Prato, Tuscany. He published his first poetry while still at school at the age of sixteen with a small volume of verses called Primo Vere (1879), influenced by Giosuè Carducci's Odi barbare, in which, side by side with some almost brutal imitations of Lorenzo Stecchetti, the fashionable poet of Postuma, were some translations from the Latin, distinguished by such agile grace that Giuseppe Chiarini on reading them brought the unknown youth before the public in an enthusiastic article. In 1881 D'Annunzio entered the University of Rome La Sapienza, where he became a member of various literary groups, including Cronaca Bizantina and wrote articles and criticism for local newspapers. In those university years he started to promote Italian irredentism.

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George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.
He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council.

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George Seldes
George Seldes (/ˈsɛldəs/ SEL-dəs; November 16, 1890 in Alliance Colony, New Jersey – July 2, 1995 in Windsor, Vermont) was an American investigative journalist and media critic. The writer and critic Gilbert Seldes was his younger brother. Actress Marian Seldes is his niece.
Influenced by Lincoln Steffens, his career began when he was nineteen years old and was hired at the Pittsburgh Leader. In 1914, he was appointed night editor of the Pittsburgh Post.
In 1916, he went to the United Press in London and, starting in 1917, during World War I, he moved to France to work at the Marshall Syndicate. While there, he interviewed Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme commander of the German Army. Hindenburg commented on the defeat of Germany in the war, including U.S. involvement; however this interview was censored by the U. S. military. Seldes would later comment that the publishing of this interview could have avoided the rising of the Nazis to power and, thus, World War II.
After World War I, he spent ten years as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. In 1922, he interviewed Vladimir Lenin and, in 1923, got expelled from the Soviet Union, along with three colleagues, for disguising news reports as personal letters; a letter his publisher wrote for the Soviets only facilitated his expulsion. The newspaper then sent him to Italy, where he reported on opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti's murder, implicated Benito Mussolini in Matteotti's death, and was again expelled.

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Giacomo Acerbo
Giacomo Acerbo, Baron of Aterno (July 25, 1888 – January 9, 1969) was an Italian economist and Fascist politician that drafted the Acerbo Law which solidified Benito Mussolini's position once in power.
He was born to an old family of the local nobility of Loreto Aprutino (province of Pescara), and was educated in Pisa, graduating in agricultural sciences from the University of Pisa in 1912. Acerbo's affiliation with the Freemasons led him to become an advocate of irredentism and Italy's entry to World War I. When war exploded upon the continent, he volunteered for military service. By the end of the war, he was decorated with three silver medals for military valor and promoted to the rank of captain.
Acerbo resumed his work as an assistant professor in the faculty of economics, and planned for a university career. At the same time, he promoted the Association of Servicemen of Teramo and Chieti (l'Associazione dei combattenti di Teramo e Chieti), which broke away from the national association after the election of 1919 and became the Provincial Combat Group (il Fascio di combattimento provinciale).

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Giacomo Matteotti
Giacomo Matteotti ( It-Giacomo Matteotti.ogg (help·info)) (22 May 1885 – 10 June 1924) was an Italian socialist politician. On 30 May 1924, he openly spoke in the Italian Parliament alleging the Fascists committed fraud in the recently held elections, and denounced the violence they used to gain votes. Eleven days later he was kidnapped and killed by Fascists.
Matteotti was born a son of a wealthy family, in Fratta Polesine, Province of Rovigo (Veneto).
A graduate in law from the University of Bologna and from early on an activist in the socialist movement and the Italian Socialist Party, he opposed Italy's entry into World War I (and was interned in Sicily during the conflict for this reason).
He was elected deputy three times: in 1919, 1921 and 1924.
As a follower of Filippo Turati, Matteotti became the leader of the United Socialist Party in the Italian Chamber of Deputies after the scission of the Socialist Party. He openly spoke out against Fascism and Benito Mussolini, and for a time was leader of the opposition to the National Fascist Party (PNF). Since 1921 he denounced fascist violences in a pamphlet titled Inchiesta socialista sulle gesta dei fascisti in Italia (Socialist enquiry on the deeds of the fascists in Italy).

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Giovanni Gentile
Giovanni Gentile (Italian pronunciation: [dʒoˈvanni dʒenˈtiːle]; May 30, 1875 – April 15, 1944) was an Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher, a peer of Benedetto Croce. He described himself as 'the philosopher of Fascism', and ghostwrote A Doctrine of Fascism (1932) for Benito Mussolini. He also devised his own system of philosophy, Actual Idealism.
Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Sicily. He was inspired by Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi, “self-construction”, but also was strongly influenced by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought — namely Karl Marx, Hegel, and Fichte with whom he shared the ideal of creating a Wissenschaftslehre, theory for a structure of knowledge that makes no assumptions. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, influenced him, as seen in an analogy between Nietzsche's Übermensch and Gentile's Uomo Fascista.
He won the fierce competition and became one of the four exceptional students of the mythic Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he enrolled at the Faculty of Humanities.

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Giovanni Giolitti
Giovanni Giolitti (Italian pronunciation: [dʒoˈvanni dʒoˈlitti]; Mondovì, October 27, 1842 – Cavour, July 17, 1928) was an Italian statesman. He was the 19th, 25th, 29th, 32nd and 37th Prime Minister of Italy between 1892 and 1921. He is the second-longest serving Prime Minister in Italian history, after Benito Mussolini, becoming Prime Minister on five occasions over 20 years.
Giolitti was a master in the political art of Trasformismo, the method of making a flexible, centrist coalition of government which isolated the extremes of the left and the right in Italian politics after the unification. Under his influence, the Italian Liberals did not develop as a structured party. They were, instead, a series of informal personal groupings with no formal links to political constituencies. The period between the turn-of-the-twentieth-century to the start of Word War I, when he was Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior from 1901-1914 with only brief interruptions, is often called the Giolittian Era.

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Guglielmo Marconi
Guglielmo Marconi (Italian pronunciation: [ɡuʎˈʎɛːlmo marˈkoːni]; 25 April 1874 – 20 July 1937) was an Italian inventor, known as the father of long distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Marconi is often credited as the inventor of radio, and indeed he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy". Much of Marconi's work in radio transmission was built upon previous experimentation and the commercial exploitation of ideas by others such as Hertz, Maxwell, Faraday, Popov, Lodge, Fessenden, Stone, Bose, and Tesla. As an entrepreneur, businessman, and founder of the The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company in 1897, Marconi succeeded in making a commercial success of radio by innovating and building on the work of previous experimenters and physicists. In 1924, he was ennobled as Marchese Marconi.
Marconi was born in Bologna on April 25, 1874, the second son of Giuseppe Marconi, an Italian landowner, and his Irish wife, Annie Jameson, daughter of Andrew Jameson of Daphne Castle in the County Wexford, Ireland and granddaughter of John Jameson, founder of whiskey distillers Jameson & Sons. Marconi was educated privately in Bologna in the lab of Augusto Righi, in Florence at the Istituto Cavallero and, later, in Livorno. As a child Marconi did not do well in school.Baptized as a Catholic, he was also a member of the Anglican Church, being married into it; however, he still received a Catholic annulment.

wn.com/Guglielmo_Marconi
Gustavs Celmiņš

Gustavs Celmiņš (April 1, 1899 in Riga – April 10, 1968), was a Latvian politician. He was educated at the commerce school of the Riga Stock Exchange, and graduated in Moscow. In 1917, he began studies at the Riga Polytechnical Institute which had been evacuated to Moscow. After the October Revolution, he returned to Latvia.
In 1918, Celmiņš enlisted into the newly-created Latvian Army, and was promoted to lieutenant the following year, and was then appointed Latvian military attaché in Poland. In 1921, he was awarded the Order of Lāčplēsis.
Retired from army in 1924, he worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1925 to 1927. Celmiņš became the secretary of Minister of Foreign Affairs, and subsequently worked in the Finance Ministry. On 24 January 1932, the Latvian nationalist group Ugunskrusts was founded, and Gustavs Celmiņš was elected as its leader. After Ugunskrusts was banned, he founded the organization Pērkonkrusts ("Thundercross"). Common for both organisations was that they advocated a national revolution for a radical re-organisation of society, politics, and the economy in Latvia. Following Kārlis Ulmanis' 15 May 1934 coup d'état, Celmiņš was arrested and imprisoned for three years. He was exiled from Latvia in 1937.

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Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (pronounced [ˈhaɪnʁɪç ˈluˑɪtˌpɔlt ˈhɪmlɐ] ( listen) 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo (Secret State Police). Serving as Reichsführer and later as Commander of the Replacement (Home) Army and General Plenipotentiary for the entire Reich's administration (Generalbevollmächtigter für die Verwaltung), Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and one of the persons most directly responsible for the Holocaust.
As overseer of the concentration camps, extermination camps, and Einsatzgruppen (literally: task forces, often used as death squads operating to the rear of frontline troops to murder Jews, communists and 'untermensch' in occupied territories), Himmler coordinated the killing of some six million Jews, between 200,000 and 500,000 Roma, many prisoners of war, and possibly another three to four million Poles, as well as other groups whom the Nazis deemed unworthy to live, including people with physical and mental disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses, members of the Confessing Church, and homosexuals. Shortly before the end of the war, he offered to surrender both Germany and himself to the Western Allies if he were spared prosecution. After being arrested by British forces on 22 May 1945, he committed suicide the following day before he could be questioned.

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Ikki Kita
Ikki Kita (北一輝, Kita Ikki^?, 3 April 1883 – 19 August 1937) was a Japanese author, intellectual and political philosopher who was active in early-Shōwa period Japan.
Born on Sado Island, Niigata Prefecture, Ikki Kita’s real name was Kita Terujirō (北輝次郎). He audited lectures at Waseda University in Tokyo, and while a student, was attracted to socialist ideas, meeting with many influential figures in the early socialist movement in Japan. This movement was, however, full of "opportunist" and other statist currents. The Shakai seisaku gakkai, or Japanese social-policy school, followed their authoritarian and statist, Bismarckian and von Schmollerian German forebears in arguing for, as well as being very practical in, their implementation of extending state controls from above—including the social insurance policies that were adopted by Bismarck to prevent any further expansion of the mass-revolutionary socialist party in late 19th-century Germany.
The socialism that Kita espoused in his early period was a nationalism brand of socialism (or right-wing Romantic anti-capitalism^{[clarification needed]}) that had nothing in common with any Marxian notions of "socialism from below".

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Istria
Istria (Croatian, Slovene: Istra, Čakavian: Istrija, Jistra, Croatian pronunciation: [îstra]; Italian: Istria; Istriot: Eîstria; German: Istrien; Hungarian: Isztria), formerly Histria (Latin), is the largest peninsula in the Adriatic Sea. The peninsula is located at the head of the Adriatic between the Gulf of Trieste and the Bay of Kvarner. It is shared by three countries: Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy.
The geographical features of Istria include the Učka mountain ridge, which is the highest portion of the Ćićarija mountain range; the rivers Dragonja, Mirna, Pazinčica, and Raša; and the Lim bay and valley. Istria lies in three countries: Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. By far the largest portion (89%) lies in Croatia. "Croatian Istria" is divided into two counties, the larger being Istria County in western Croatia. Important towns in Istria County include Pula, Poreč, Rovinj, Pazin, Labin, Umag, Motovun, Buzet, and Buje. Smaller towns in Istria County include Višnjan, Roč, and Hum.
The northwestern part of Istria lies in Slovenia: it is known as Slovenian Istria, and includes the coastal municipalities of Piran, Izola and Koper, and the Karstic municipality of Hrpelje-Kozina. Northwards of Slovenian Istria, there is a tiny portion of the peninsula that lies in Italy. This smallest portion of Istria consists of the comunes of Muggia and San Dorligo della Valle.

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Italian Wars
The Italian Wars, often referred to as the Great Italian Wars or the Great Wars of Italy and sometimes as the Habsburg–Valois Wars or the Renaissance Wars, were a series of conflicts from 1494 to 1559 that involved, at various times, most of the city-states of Italy, the Papal States, most of the major states of Western Europe (France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, England, and Scotland) as well as the Ottoman Empire. Originally arising from dynastic disputes over the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of Naples, the wars rapidly became a general struggle for power and territory among their various participants, and were marked with an increasing number of alliances, counter-alliances, and betrayals.
Following the Wars in Lombardy between Venice and Milan, which ended in 1454, Northern Italy had been largely at peace during the reigns of Cosimo de' Medici and Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence, with the notable exception of the War of Ferrara in 1482-1484.
Spain had promised not to interfere with France's adventures in Italy in return for Roussillon and Cerdagne, which were ceded to Spain under the Treaty of Barcelona of 1492.

wn.com/Italian_Wars
J. Salwyn Schapiro
Jacob Salwyn Schapiro (December 19, 1879 – December 30, 1973) was a Professor Emeritus of History at the City College of New York.
In his book, Liberalism and the Challenge of Fascism, Schapiro set out to discuss the changes in both England and France. Prof. Schapiro contrasted the smooth evolution of liberalism in England to the violent swings back and forth between reaction and liberal forces in France. This historical violent dialectic in France, in Schapiro's argument, was what created the basic ideas of Nazism.
Prof. Schapiro's Definition of Fascism

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Joseph de Maistre
Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre (French pronunciation: [də mɛstʁ] 1 April 1753 – 26 February 1821) was a French-speaking Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer, and diplomat. He defended hierarchical societies and a monarchical State in the period immediately following the French Revolution. Despite his close ties with France, Maistre was a subject of the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, whom he served as member of the Savoy Senate (1787–1792), ambassador to Russia (1803–1817), and minister of state to the court in Turin (1817–1821).
Maistre, a key figure of the Counter-Enlightenment, saw monarchy both as a divinely sanctioned institution and as the only stable form of government. He called for the restoration of the House of Bourbon to the throne of France and argued that the Pope should have ultimate authority in temporal matters. Maistre also claimed that it was the rationalist rejection of Christianity which was directly responsible for the disorder and bloodshed which followed the French Revolution of 1789.

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Joseph Goebbels
Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels (help·info) (German: [ˈɡœbəls]; 29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism.
Goebbels earned a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University in 1921, writing his doctoral thesis on 19th century romantic drama; he then went on to work as a journalist and later a bank clerk and caller on the stock exchange. He also wrote novels and plays, but they were rejected by publishers. Goebbels came into contact with the National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP) or Nazi Party in 1923 during the French occupation of the Ruhr and became a member in 1924. He was appointed Gauleiter (regional party leader) of Berlin. In this position, he put his propaganda skills to full use, combating the local socialist and communist parties with the help of Nazi papers and the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (Brownshirts). By 1928, he had risen in the party ranks to become one of its most prominent members.

wn.com/Joseph_Goebbels
Julius Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar (Classical Latin: [ˈɡaː.i.ʊs ˈjuː.lɪ.ʊs ˈkaj.sar], July 100 BC – 15 March 44 BC) was a Roman general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.
In 60 BC, Caesar, Crassus and Pompey formed a political alliance that was to dominate Roman politics for several years. Their attempts to amass power through populist tactics were opposed by the conservative elite within the Roman Senate^{[citation needed]}, among them Cato the Younger with the frequent support of Cicero. Caesar's conquest of Gaul, completed by 51 BC, extended Rome's territory to the English Channel and the Rhine. Caesar became the first Roman general to cross both when he built a bridge across the Rhine and conducted the first invasion of Britain.
These achievements granted him unmatched military power and threatened to eclipse Pompey's standing. The balance of power was further upset by the death of Crassus in 53 BC. Political realignments in Rome finally led to a standoff between Caesar and Pompey, the latter having taken up the cause of the Senate. Ordered by the Senate to stand trial in Rome for various charges, Caesar marched on Rome with one legion—legio XIII—from Gaul to Italy, crossing the Rubicon in 49 BC. This sparked a civil war from which he emerged as the unrivaled leader of the Roman world.

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Kevin Coogan
Kevin Coogan is an American investigative journalist. He is the author of the biography Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International.
Coogan's work has appeared in The Village Voice, Mother Jones, Hit List, and The Nation. He has been interviewed a number of times on Dave Emory's For the Record radio show.

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Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky (Russian: Лев Троцкий, pronounced [ˈlʲef ˈtrot͡skʲɪj] ( listen); 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army.
Trotsky was initially a supporter of the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He joined the Bolsheviks immediately prior to the 1917 October Revolution, and eventually became a leader within the Party. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army as People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–20). He was also among the first members of the Politburo.
After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power, expelled from the Communist Party, deported from the Soviet Union and assassinated on Stalin's orders. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism, Trotsky also opposed Stalin's non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s.

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List of SS personnel
Between 1925 and 1945, the German SS grew from a mere eight members to over a quarter of a million Waffen-SS and over a million Allgemeine-SS members. The following list of SS personnel gives the names of persons who are counted among the organization's most famous, influential, and notorious members.
Prior to 1934 the SS were nominally under the command of the Sturmabteilung and so it could be said that both Adolf Hitler as Oberster SA-Führer and Ernst Röhm as Stabschef SA outranked the most senior SS position of Reichsführer. Following the Night of the Long Knives Hitler "raised the SS, hitherto subordinate to the SA, to the rank of an independent organisation". Hitler also was considered SS Member #1, Emil Maurice (considered the founder of the SS) was Member #2, while Himmler was SS Member #168. Based on the seniority system of SS membership number, this made Hitler senior in the SS to all other members even if not by rank.
After the Night of the Long Knives, when the SS became independent from the SA, Hitler was listed on SS officer rolls as Member #1 and considered supreme commander of the entire SS by virtue of his position as the Führer of Germany. There is no photographic record of Hitler ever wearing an actual SS uniform nor was there a special SS insignia for Hitler above that worn by Himmler

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Lombards
The Lombards or Langobards (Latin: Langobardī), were a Germanic tribe who from 568 to 774 ruled a Kingdom in Italy.
The Lombard historian Paul the Deacon wrote in the Historia Langobardorum that the Lombards descended from a small tribe called the Winnili, dwelling in southern Scandinavia (Scadanan), who had migrated southward to seek new lands. In the 1st century AD they formed part of the Suebi, in northwestern Germany. By the end of the 5th century they had moved into the area roughly coinciding with modern Austria north of the Danube river, where they subdued the Heruls and later fought frequent wars with the Gepids. The Lombard king Audoin defeated the Gepid leader Thurisind in 551 or 552; his successor Alboin eventually destroyed the Gepids at the Battle of Asfeld in 567.
Following this victory, Alboin decided to lead his people to Italy, which had become severely depopulated after the long Gothic War (535–554) between the Byzantine Empire and the Ostrogothic Kingdom there. The Lombards were joined by numerous Saxons, Heruls, Gepids, Bulgars, Thuringians, and Ostrogoths, and their invasion of Italy was almost unopposed. By late 569 they had conquered all the principal cities north of the Po River except Pavia, which fell in 572. At the same time, they occupied areas in central Italy and southern Italy. They established a Lombard Kingdom in Italy, later named Regnum Italicum ("Kingdom of Italy"), which reached its zenith under the eighth-century ruler Liutprand. In 774, the Kingdom was conquered by the Frankish King Charlemagne, and integrated into his Empire. However, Lombard nobles continued to rule parts of the Italian peninsula well into the 11th century, when they were conquered by the Normans, and added to their Kingdom of Sicily. Their legacy is apparent in the regional appellation, Lombardy.

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Luigi Facta
Luigi Facta (November 16, 1861, Pinerolo, Province of Turin – November 5, 1930) was an Italian politician, journalist and last Prime Minister of Italy before the leadership of Benito Mussolini.
Facta was born in Pinerolo, Piedmont, Italy. He studied law and later became a journalist. He entered politics in 1892 when he was elected to the chamber of deputies for Pinerolo, a seat which he held for 30 years. Facta, a member of the Liberal Party, served as undersecretary of the justice and interior departments in the coalition cabinets for much of his time in Parliament. He was also finance minister from 1910 until 1912 and 1917 until 1924. At the outbreak of World War I, Facta supported neutrality for Italy, but then supported the war when Italy entered it. His son was killed in the war, and he said that he was proud to give a son to his country.
Facta was appointed Prime Minister in February 1922. At the time, Italy was in political turmoil, and was dealing with Mussolini's fascist insurgency. In July 1922, Facta was dismissed from office for not effectively dealing with the fascists,^{[citation needed]} but no one else was able to form a government, so he was again reappointed Prime Minister by the King. Facta did not openly oppose Benito Mussolini, even though the latter had openly called for his resignation, and he was slow to react to insurrectionist attitudes within the population. When Facta did finally react to the mounting situation, it was to declare martial law. Instead of signing Facta's decree, King Victor Emmanuel III again dismissed Facta from office and asked Mussolini to form a government instead. In 1924, King Victor Emmanuel III named him senator.

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Léon Degrelle
Léon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle (15 June 1906 – 31 March 1994) was a Walloon Belgian politician, who founded Rexism and later joined the Waffen SS (becoming a leader of its Walloon contingent) which were front-line troops in the fight against the Soviet Union. After World War II, he was a prominent figure in neo-nazi movements.
After studying at a Jesuit college and successfully studying for a law doctorate at the Université catholique de Louvain, Degrelle worked as a journalist for the conservative Roman Catholic periodical Christus Rex. During his time at this publication, he became attracted to the ideas of Charles Maurras and French Integralism. Until 1934, Degrelle worked as a correspondent for the paper in Mexico, during the Cristero War. He led a militant tendency inside the Catholic Party, which he formed around the Éditions de Rex he founded. The Éditions drew its name from the battle cry of the Cristeros: Viva Cristo Rey y Santa María de Guadalupe, alluding to Christ the King.

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Marcel Déat
Marcel Déat (7 March 1894, Guérigny, France – 5 January 1955, near Turin, Italy) was a French Socialist until 1933, when he initiated a spin-off from the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) along with other right-wing 'Neosocialists'. He then founded the collaborationist National Popular Rally (RNP) during the Vichy regime. In 1944, he became "Minister of Labor and National Solidarity" in Pierre Laval's government, before escaping to Sigmaringen along with Vichy officials after the Allied landings in Normandy. Condemned in absentia for collaborationism, he died while still in hiding in Italy.
Marcel Déat was raised in a modest environment, which shared republican and patriotic values. After brilliant studies, he entered in 1914 the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) after having been the student of Alain, a philosopher who was active in the Radical Party and who would write a deeply anti-militarist book after World War I. The same year, Déat joined the SFIO.
While he attended the ENS and worked to get a philosophy degree, World War I broke out. He joined the French Army as a private and saw active duty, winning the Légion d'honneur and five bravery citations. By the war's end, Déat had achieved the rank of captain. Under the pseudonym of Taëd, he then published Cadavres et maximes, philosophie d'un revenant (approximately translated by "Corpses and Maxims, Philosophy of a Ghost"), in which he expressed his horror of trenches, strong pacifist views, as well as his fascination for collective discipline and war camaraderie. When the war ended in 1918, he finished his studies at the École Normale and passed his agrégation of philosophy, and oriented himself towards sociology under the direction of Célestin Bouglié, a friend of Alain and also member of the Radical Party. In the meanwhile, Déat taught philosophy in Reims.

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Mario Roatta
Mario Roatta (1887–1968) was an Italian general, Benito Mussolini's Chief-of-Staff, and head of the military secret service.
Roatta was born in Modena, Emilia-Romagna.
From 1934 to 1936, Roatta headed up the Italian Military Intelligence Service (Servizio Informazioni Militari , or SIM).
Mario Roatta was fighting alongside Francisco Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War where was made the Commander-in-Chief of the Corps of Volunteer Troops (Corpo Truppe Volontarie, or CTV), the Italian expeditionary force in December 1936 and his Deputy Commander was Luigi Frusci.
In early 1937, Roatta led Italian forces in the Battle of Málaga, a decisive Nationalist victory. However, he later played a leading role in the planning for the Battle of Guadalajara, a decisive Republican victory and Italian defeat.
By 1938, Roatta was replaced as Commander-in-Chief of the CTV by Ettore Bastico and, instead, commanded the Flechas Division.
In accord with the 1920s speech by Mussolini:
Mario Roatta's "Circular 3C" (Circolare 3C), tantamount to a declaration of war on the Slovene civil population, involved him in war crimes while he was the commander of the 2nd Italian Army in Province of Ljubljana. Mario Roatta "issued orders to kill hostages, demolish houses and whole villages: his idea was to deport all inhabitants of Slovenia and replace them with Italian settlers". Under the commander Mario Roatta's watch the ethnic cleansing and the violence against the Slovene civil population easily matched the German with the summary executions, hostage-taking and hostage killing, reprisals, internments into Rab and Gonars concentration camps, the burning of houses and villages. Additional special instructions that included instruction that the orders must be "carried out most energetically and without any false compassion" were issued by Roatta.

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Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti is an American political writer, historian, and culture critic who writes on scholarly and popular subjects. He has taught at American and international universities and has been a guest lecturer before campus and community audiences. He has played an activist role in political struggles, and in various anti-war movements.
Parenti received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. He is the author of twenty four books and many more articles. His works have been translated into at least eighteen languages. Parenti lectures frequently throughout the United States and abroad. He wrote The Assassination of Julius Caesar, He is the father of Christian Parenti, an author and contributor to The Nation magazine.
Parenti's writings cover a wide range of subjects: U.S. politics, culture, ideology, political economy, imperialism, fascism, communism, democratic socialism, free-market orthodoxies, conservative judicial activism, religion, ancient history, modern history, historiography, repression in academia, news and entertainment media, technology, environmentalism, sexism, racism, homophobia, Venezuela, the wars in Iraq and Yugoslavia, ethnicity, and his own early life. Perhaps his most influential book is Democracy for the Few, now in its ninth edition, a critical analysis of U.S. society, economy, and political institutions and a college-level political science textbook published by Wadsworth Publishing. In recent years he has addressed such subjects as "Empires: Past and Present," "US Interventionism: the Case of Iraq," "Race, Gender, and Class Power," "Ideology and History," "The Collapse of Communism," and "Terrorism and Globalization."

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Napoleon I of France
Napoleon Bonaparte (French: Napoléon Bonaparte [napoleɔ̃ bɔnɑpaʁt]) (15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821) was a French military and political leader who rose to prominence during the latter stages of the French Revolution. As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815. His legal reform, the Napoleonic Code, has been a major influence on many civil law jurisdictions worldwide, but he is best remembered for his role in the wars led against France by a series of coalitions, the so-called Napoleonic Wars. He established hegemony over most of continental Europe and sought to spread the ideals of the French Revolution, while consolidating an imperial monarchy which restored aspects of the deposed Ancien Régime. Due to his success in these wars, often against numerically superior enemies, he is generally regarded as one of the greatest military commanders of all time and his campaigns are studied at military academies throughout much of the world.
Napoleon was born in Corsica to parents of noble Genoese ancestry, and trained as an artillery officer in mainland France. He rose to prominence under the French First Republic and led successful campaigns against the First and Second Coalitions arrayed against France. In 1799, he staged a coup d'état and installed himself as First Consul; five years later the French Senate proclaimed him emperor. In the first decade of the 19th century, the French Empire under Napoleon engaged in a series of conflicts—the Napoleonic Wars—involving every major European power.

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Omar Mukhtar
Omar Mukhtar (Arabic: عمر المختار Omar Al-Mukhtār) (1862 – September 16, 1931), of the Mnifa, was born in the small village of Janzour, near Tobruk in eastern Barqa (Cyrenaica) in Libya. Beginning in 1912, he organized and, for nearly twenty years, led native resistance to Italian colonization of Libya. The Italians captured and hanged him in 1931.
Omar Almukhtar was born in eastern Cyrenaica, Al Butnan District, in the village of East Janzur east of Tobruk. He was orphaned early and was adopted by Sharif El Gariani, nephew of Hussein Ghariani, a political-religious leader in Cyrenaica. He received his early education at the local mosque and then studied for eight years at the Senussi university at Jaghbub, which was also the headquarters of the Senussi Movement. In 1899 he was sent with other Senussi to assist Rabih az-Zubayr in the resistance in Chad against the French.
In October 1911, during the Italo-Turkish War, an Italian naval contingent under the command of Admiral Luigi Faravelli reached the shores of Libya, then a territory subject to Ottoman Turkish control. The admiral demanded that the Turkish administration and garrison surrender their territory to the Italians or incur the immediate destruction of the city of Tripoli.^{[citation needed]} The Turks and their Libyan allies withdrew to the countryside instead of surrendering, and the Italians bombarded the city for three days, then proclaimed the Tripolitanians to be "committed and strongly bound to Italy." This marked the beginning of a series of battles between the Italian colonial forces and the Libyan armed opposition under Omar Mukhtar.

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Ostrogoths
The Ostrogoths (Latin: Ostrogothi or Austrogothi) were a branch of the Goths (the other branch being the Visigoths), a Germanic tribe who developed a vast empire north of the Black Sea in the 3rd century AD and, in the late 5th century, under Theodoric the Great, established a Kingdom in Italy.
Invading southward from the Baltic Sea, the Ostrogoths, at the time known as the Greuthungi, built up a huge empire stretching from the Dniester to the Volga river and from the Black Sea to the Baltic shores. The Ostrogoths were probably literate in the 3rd century, and their trade with the Romans was highly developed. Their Danubian kingdom reached its zenith under King Ermanaric, who is said to have committed suicide at an old age when the Huns attacked his people and subjugated them about 370.
After their subjugation by the Huns, little is heard of the Ostrogoths for about 80 years, after which they reappear in Pannonia on the middle Danube River as federates of the Romans. However, a pocket remained behind in the Crimea when the bulk of them moved to central Europe, and these Crimean Ostrogoths existed until at least the 16th century. After the collapse of the Hun empire after the Battle of Nedao (453), the Ostrogoths under Theodoric the Great first moved to Moesia (c. 475–488) and later conquered the Italian Kingdom of the German warrior Odoacer. Theodoric became King of the Ostrogothic Kingdom in 493 and died in 526. A period of instability then ensued, tempting the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian to declare war on the Ostrogoths in 535 in an effort to restore the former western provinces of the Roman Empire. Initially, the Byzantines were successful, but under the leadership of Totila, the Goths reconquered most of the lost territory until Totila's death at the Battle of Taginae. The war lasted for almost 20 years and caused enormous damage and depopulation of Italy. The remaining Ostrogoths were absorbed into the Lombards who established a Kingdom in Italy in 567 AD.

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Oswald Moseley
Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats, (16 November 1896 – 3 December 1980) was an English politician, known principally as the founder of the British Union of Fascists. He was a Member of Parliament for Harrow from 1918 to 1924 and for Smethwick from 1926 to 1931, as well as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Labour Government of 1929–1931.
Mosley was the eldest of three sons of Sir Oswald Mosley, 5th Baronet, of Ancoats (29 December 1873 - 21 September 1928), and wife Katharine Maud Edwards-Heathcote (1874–1950), the second child of Captain Justinian Edwards-Heathcote of Market Drayton, Shropshire. Mosley's family were Anglo-Irish. His branch were prosperous landowners in Staffordshire, seated at Rolleston Hall, near Burton-on-Trent. Through the intermarriage common among the British upper classes, the 5th Baronet was the third cousin of the Earl of Strathmore, which would eventually make Oswald Mosley, the 6th baronet, fourth cousin to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, who was the Earl of Strathmore's daughter, and fourth cousin once removed to Queen Elizabeth II.

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Oswald Mosley
Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats, (16 November 1896 – 3 December 1980) was an English politician, known principally as the founder of the British Union of Fascists. He was a Member of Parliament for Harrow from 1918 to 1924 and for Smethwick from 1926 to 1931, as well as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Labour Government of 1929–1931.
Mosley was the eldest of three sons of Sir Oswald Mosley, 5th Baronet, of Ancoats (29 December 1873 - 21 September 1928), and wife Katharine Maud Edwards-Heathcote (1874–1950), the second child of Captain Justinian Edwards-Heathcote of Market Drayton, Shropshire. Mosley's family were Anglo-Irish. His branch were prosperous landowners in Staffordshire, seated at Rolleston Hall, near Burton-on-Trent. Through the intermarriage common among the British upper classes, the 5th Baronet was the third cousin of the Earl of Strathmore, which would eventually make Oswald Mosley, the 6th baronet, fourth cousin to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, who was the Earl of Strathmore's daughter, and fourth cousin once removed to Queen Elizabeth II.

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Plato
Plato ( /ˈpleɪtoʊ/; Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, "broad"; 424/423 BC – 348/347 BC) was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. In the words of A. N. Whitehead:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.
Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him. Plato's writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts. Plato's dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics.

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Plínio Salgado
Plínio Salgado (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈplĩnju sawˈɡadu]; January 22, 1895 – December 8, 1975) was a Brazilian politician, writer, journalist, and theologian. He founded and led the Brazilian Integralist Action, a far-right political party inspired on the Italian Fascist movement.
Initially a supporter of the dictatorship led by Getúlio Vargas, he was later persecuted and exiled in Portugal for promoting uprisings against the government. After his return, he launched the Party of Popular Representation, and was elected to represent Paraná in the Chamber of Deputies in 1958, being re-elected in 1962, this time to represent São Paulo. He was also a candidate in the 1955 presidential election, securing 8.28% of the votes. After the 1964 coup d'état, which led to the extinction of political parties, he joined the National Renewal Alliance Party, obtaining two terms in the Chamber of Deputies. He retired from politics in 1974, just a year before his death.
Born in the small conservative town of São Bento do Sapucaí in the São Paulo state, Plínio Salgado was the son of Colonel Francisco das Chagas, a local political leader, and Ana Francisca Rennó Cortez, a teacher. A very active child at school, he had special interest for mathematics and geometry. After the loss of his father, at the age of 16 – a fact that is said to have made him a bitter young man –, his interests shifted towards psychology and philosophy.

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Renzo De Felice
Renzo De Felice (8 April 1929 - 25 May 1996) was an Italian historian, who specialized in the Fascist era.
He was born in Rieti and studied under Federico Chabod and Delio Cantimori at the Sapienza University of Rome. During his time as student, De Felice was a member of the Italian Communist Party. After the 1956 Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution, De Felice was among 101 Italian intellectuals who sharply criticized the Italian Communist Party for its backing of the Soviets. He broke with the Communists and joined the Italian Socialist Party. He taught history at the University of Rome. He was married to Livia De Ruggiero. He died in Rome.
De Felice was best known for a massive seven volume biography of Benito Mussolini that was unfinished at the time of his death. De Felice was the founder and editor of the influential journal Storia Contemporanea. De Felice also wrote a well-regarded history of Jewish life under the Fascist government and articles on Italian Jacobinism.
De Felice's leading interest was in fascism. In his view, there were two types of fascism, "fascism as a movement" and "fascism as a regime". De Felice saw the fascism, especially in the "movement" stage, as a revolutionary middle-class ideology that had deep roots in the Enlightenment. Moveover, De Felice insisted that fascism was not caused by fear of a proletarian revolution on the part of the lower middle classes - as much of the historiography on fascism maintained - but was rather an assertive movement originated by an emerging middle class in search for its proper role.

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Roger Griffin
Roger D. Griffin (born 31 January 1948) is a British academic political theorist at Oxford Brookes University, England. His recent efforts have focused on a definition and examination of fascism. He has also translated works by Norberto Bobbio and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi.
Griffin's theory of fascism suggests that a heuristically useful ideal type of its definitional core is that it is a form of palingenetic ultranationalism. In other words it seeks, by directly mobilizing popular energies or working through an elite, to eventually conquer cultural hegemony for new values, to bring about the total rebirth of the nation from its present decadence, whether the nation is conceived as a historically formed nation-state or a racially determined 'ethnos'. Conceived in these terms, fascism is an ideology that has assumed a large number of specific national permutations and several distinct organizational forms. Moreover, it is a political project that continues to evolve to this day throughout the Europeanized world, though it remains highly marginalized compared with the central place it occupied in inter-war Europe.

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Roman Emperor
The Roman emperor was the ruler of the Roman State during the imperial period (starting at about 27 BC). The Romans had no single term for the office although at any given time, a given title was associated with the emperor. If a man was "proclaimed emperor" this normally meant he was proclaimed augustus, or (for generals) imperator (from which English emperor ultimately derives). Several other titles and offices were regularly accumulated by emperors, such as caesar, princeps senatus, consul and Pontifex Maximus. The power of emperors was generally based on the accumulation of powers from republican offices and the support of the army.
Roman emperors refused to be considered "kings", instead claiming to be leaders of a republic, however nominal. The first emperor, Augustus, resolutely refused recognition as a monarch. Although Augustus could claim that his power was authentically Republican, his successor, Tiberius, could not convincingly make the same claim. Nonetheless, the Republican institutional framework (senate, consuls, magistracies etc.) was preserved until the very end of the Western Empire.

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Sadao Araki
Baron Sadao Araki (荒木貞夫, Araki Sadao^?, 26 May 1877 – 2 November 1966) was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army before World War II. A charismatic leader and one of the principal nationalist right-wing political theorists in the late Japanese Empire, he was regarded as the leader of the radical faction within the politicized Japanese Army and served as Minister of War under Prime Minister Inukai. He later served a Minister of Education during the Konoe and Hiranuma administrations.
Araki was born in Komae, Tokyo; his father was an ex-samurai retainer of the Hitotsubashi branch of the Tokugawa family. Araki graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in November 1897; and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in June of the following year.
Promoted to lieutenant in November 1900 and promoted to captain in June 1904, Araki served as company commander of the 1st Imperial Regiment during the Russo-Japanese War.
After the war, Araki returned to graduate from the Army Staff College at the head of his class. He served on the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff in April 1908, and served as a language officer stationed in Russia from November 1909 to May 1913, when he was made military attaché to Saint Petersburg during World War I. He was promoted to major in July 1918 and was assigned to the Kwantung Army.

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Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (German pronunciation: [ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt]), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud's family and ancestry were Jewish. Freud always considered himself a Jew even though he rejected Judaism and had a critical view of religion. Freud's parents were poor, but ensured his education. Freud was an outstanding pupil in high school, and graduated the Matura with honors in 1873. Interested in philosophy as a student, Freud later turned away from it and became a neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, Aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy.
Freud went on to develop theories about the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and established the field of verbal psychotherapy by creating psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst. Though psychoanalysis has declined as a therapeutic practice, it has helped inspire the development of many other forms of psychotherapy, some diverging from Freud's original ideas and approach. Freud postulated the existence of libido (an energy with which mental process and structures are invested), developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association (in which patients report their thoughts without reservation and make no attempt to concentrate while doing so), discovered the transference (the process by which patients displace on to their analysts feelings based on their experience of earlier figures in their lives) and established its central role in the analytic process, and proposed that dreams help to preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled wishes that would otherwise awake the dreamer. He was also a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the interpretation and critique of culture.

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Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939. The war began after a pronunciamiento (declaration of opposition) by a group of generals under the leadership of José Sanjurjo against the elected government of the Second Spanish Republic, at the time under the leadership of President Manuel Azaña. The rebel coup was supported by a number of conservative groups including the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right, monarchists such as the religious conservative Carlists, and the Fascist Falange. The uprising was authoritarian and anti-separatist in inspiration; anti-Basque and anti-Catalan feeling marked the Nationalist zone.
Following the only partially successful coup, Spain was left militarily and politically divided. From that moment onwards, general Francisco Franco began a protracted war of attrition against the established government for the control of the country. The rebel forces received the support of Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy, as well as neighbouring Portugal, while the Soviet Union and Mexico intervened in support of the Republican government or loyalist side.

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Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (now Edison, New Jersey) by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.
Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.

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Vidkun Quisling
Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling (Norwegian: [ˈʋɪdkʉn ˈkʋɪʃlɪŋ] (listen); 18 July 1887 – 24 October 1945) was a Norwegian politician. On 9 April 1940, with the German invasion of Norway in progress, he seized power in a Nazi-backed coup d'etat.
From 1942 to 1945 he served as Minister-President, working with the occupying forces. His government, known as the Quisling regime, was dominated by ministers from Nasjonal Samling, the party he had founded in 1933. The collaborationist government participated in Germany's Final Solution. Quisling was put on trial during the post-war legal purge in Norway and found guilty of charges including embezzlement, murder and high treason. He was executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress, Oslo, on 24 October 1945. During World War II, quisling became a synonym for traitor.
The son of a Church of Norway pastor, Quisling blended Christian fundamentals, scientific developments and philosophy into a new theory he called Universism. Before going into politics, he proved himself in the military, joining the General Staff in 1911 and specialising in Russian affairs. He was posted to Russia in 1918, and worked with Fridtjof Nansen during the 1921 famine in the Ukraine, returning to Russia to work with Frederik Prytz in Moscow. When Prytz left in 1927, Quisling stayed on as the Norwegian diplomat responsible for managing British diplomatic affairs. For these services he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by King George V, though the honour was later rescinded. He returned to Norway in 1929, and served as Minister of Defence during the Agrarian governments (1931–33). Although Quisling achieved some popularity after his attacks on the political left, his party never polled well and was little more than peripheral at the time of his 1940 coup.

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Vihtori Kosola
Iisakki Vihtori Kosola (10 July 1884 – 14 December 1936) was the leader of the Finnish right-wing radical Lapua Movement.
Kosola was born in Ylihärmä, Southern Ostrobothnia. His family's farmhouse burnt down the next year, and the family moved to Lapua. His formative years were spent in farming and cattle-breeding.
Kosola was an active recruiter of Finnish Jäger troops to Germany from autumn 1915, and was incarcerated in 1916. He was imprisoned in Helsinki, then at the Shpalernaya prison in St. Petersburg among other Finnish activists. He was released after the Russian Revolution and eagerly took part in the Finnish Civil War against the Red Guards and the Russians. After the war Kosola led the Lapua White Guard.
In the 1920s he organized Vientirauha, a strikebreakers' organisation, in Southern Ostrobothnia. He made a speech at the first meeting of the anti-communist Lapua Movement as it was organized in 1929, and was chosen as its leader as the movement radicalized in the following year. He took part of the abortive Mäntsälä Rebellion of 1932 that ended with the dissolution and banning of the Lapua Movement and the brief imprisonment of Kosola.

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Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Russian: Владимир Ильич Ленин; IPA: [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr ɪlʲˈjitɕ ˈlʲenʲɪn] ( listen); 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, intellectual and politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years (1917–1924), as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a socialist economic system.
As a politician, Lenin was a persuasive and charismatic orator. As an intellectual his extensive theoretic and philosophical developments of Marxism produced Marxism–Leninism, a pragmatic Russian application of Marxism that emphasized the critical role played by a committed and disciplined political vanguard in the revolutionary process, while defending the possibility of a socialist revolution in less advanced capitalist countries through an alliance of the proletarians with the rural peasantry.
Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Russian: Владимир Ильич Ульянов) on 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 in the town of Simbirsk in the Russian Empire. Simbirsk, a rural town on the River Volga nearly 1,500 miles from the capital Saint Petersburg, would be renamed upon Ulyanov's death fifty-four years later as "Ulyanovsk" in his honour. That same year, Saint Petersburg itself would be renamed Leningrad after Ulyanov's better-known cadre name.

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Walter Laqueur
Walter Ze'ev Laqueur (born 26 May 1921) is an American historian and political commentator. He was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia, Prussia (modern Wrocław, Poland), to a Jewish family. In 1938, Laqueur left Germany for the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, became victims of the Holocaust. He lived in Israel 1938–53 and since then in the UK and US.
Laqueur was Director of the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London in 1965–1994. He was founder and editor, with George Mosse, of the Journal of Contemporary History and of Survey 1956–1964. He was founding editor of the The Washington Papers. From 1969 he was member, later Chairman (until 2000) International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington. Laqueur was Professor of History of Ideas at Brandeis University 1968–1972, University Professor at Georgetown University 1976–1988. He has been visiting professor of history and government at Harvard, University of Chicago, Tel Aviv and Johns Hopkins University.

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Wang Jingwei
Wang Jingwei (4 May 1883 – 10 November 1944), alternate name Wang Zhaoming, was a Chinese politician. He was initially known as a member of the left wing of the Kuomintang (KMT), but later became increasingly anti-Communist after his efforts to collaborate with the CCP ended in political failure. His politics veered sharply to the right later in his career, after he joined the Japanese.
A close associate of Sun Yat-sen, Wang is most noted for disagreements with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and for his formation of a Japanese-supported collaborationist government in Nanjing. For this role he has often been labeled as a Hanjian. His name in mainland China is also now a term used to refer to a traitor, similar to "Benedict Arnold" for Americans or "Quisling" for Norwegians.
Born in Sanshui, Guangdong, but of Zhejiang origin, Wang went to Japan as an international student sponsored by the Qing Dynasty government in 1903, and joined the Tongmenghui in 1905. As a young man, Wang came to blame the Qing dynasty for holding China back, and making it too weak to fight off exploitation by Western imperialist powers. While in Japan, Wang became a close confidant of Sun Yat-sen, and would later go on to become one of the most important members of the early Kuomintang.

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Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, Hon. RA (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British Conservative politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century, he served as Prime Minister twice (1940–45 and 1951–55). A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer, and an artist. He is the only British prime minister to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an Honorary Citizen of the United States.
Churchill was born into the aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a charismatic politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer; his mother, Jenny Jerome, was an American socialite. As a young army officer, he saw action in British India, the Sudan, and the Second Boer War. He gained fame as a war correspondent and wrote books about his campaigns.

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World War I
World War I (WWI), which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939 (World War II), and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. It involved all the world's great powers, which were assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (based on the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France and Russia) and the Central Powers (originally centred around the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy; but, as Austria–Hungary had taken the offensive against the agreement, Italy did not enter into the war). These alliances both reorganised (Italy fought for the Allies), and expanded as more nations entered the war. Ultimately more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history. More than 9 million combatants were killed, largely because of enormous increases in lethality of weapons, thanks to new technology, without corresponding improvements in protection or mobility. It was the sixth-deadliest conflict in world history, subsequently paving the way for various political changes such as revolutions in the nations involved.

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Zeev Sternhell
Zeev Sternhell (Hebrew: זאב שטרנהל‎,born 1935) is an Israeli historian and one of the world's leading experts on Fascism. Sternhell headed the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and writes for Haaretz newspaper.
Zeev Sternhell was born in Przemyśl, Poland to an affluent secular Jewish family with Zionist tendencies. His grandfather and father were textile merchants. When Russia occupied eastern Poland, Russian troops took over part of his home. His father died of natural causes. A few months after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, the family was sent to the ghetto. His mother and older sister, Ada, were killed by the Nazis when he was seven years old. An uncle who had a permit to work outside the ghetto smuggled him to Lwow. The uncle found a Polish officer who was willing to help them. Supplied with false Aryan papers, Sternhell lived with his(?) aunt, uncle and cousin as a Polish Catholic. After the war, he was baptized, taking the Polish name Zbigniew Orolski. He became an altar boy in the Cathedral of Kraków. In 1946, at the age of 11, Sternhell was taken to France on a Red Cross children's train, where he lived with an aunt. He learned French and was accepted to a school in Avignon despite stiff competition.

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Zoltán Böszörmény
Zoltán Böszörmény (5 January 1893-?) was a leading exponent of Fascism in Hungary before the Second World War.
The son of a bankrupt landowner, he initially worked a series of odd jobs, ranging from a labourer to a porter. He first flirted with politics in 1919 when he became involved in activity against Béla Kun, albeit on a very minor scale. Whilst studying at the University of Budapest he became leader of the state student movement and a supporter of Gyula Gömbös. Whilst at University he also became a poet, writing largely patriotic verses published by two agents who would later become involved in the organisation of his political movement.
He formed the National Socialist Party of Work in 1931, and a meeting with Adolf Hitler that same year convinced him further of the benefits of Nazism. The group followed Hitler's lead closely, adopting the brown shirt and swastika whilst publishing a newspaper National Socialist. As the Scythe Cross, Böszörmény's movement grew to have some 20,000 followers at its peak, although Gömbös, fearing the growing power of the movement, suppressed it. As lead of the movement Böszörmény insisted on the title vezér or 'great leader' in imitation of Hitler's Führer. A word-for-word translation of the Nazi Party's National Socialist Program served as the founding document for the Scythe Cross.

wn.com/Zoltán_Böszörmény

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Fascism
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Ideas Autarky Class collaboration Corporatism Proletarian nation Syncretic politics Totalitarianism
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Literature The Doctrine of Fascism Fascist manifesto Hutu Ten Commandments Mein Kampf My Autobiography The Myth of the Twentieth Century Zaveshchanie russkogo fashista
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Italian Fascism also known as Fascism (Italian: Fascismo) refers to the original fascist ideology in Italy. This ideology is associated with the National Fascist Party which under Benito Mussolini ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, the Republican Fascist Party which ruled the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945, the post-war Italian Social Movement, and subsequent Italian neo-fascist movements.

Italian Fascism is based upon Italian nationalism and the restoration of "Italia Irredenta" (claimed unredeemed Italian territories) to Italy as well as territorial expansionism that Italian Fascists deemed necessary for a nation to assert its superiority and strength to avoid succumbing to decay.^[1] Italian Fascists claim that modern Italy is the heir to ancient Rome and its legacy, and support the creation of an Italian Empire to provide "vital space" for colonization by Italian settlers and establishing control over the Mediterranean Sea as Italy's Mare Nostrum as it had been under the Roman Empire.^[2] Fascism promotes political violence and war as actions that create national regeneration, spirit and vitality.^[3]^[4] It views violence as a fact of life that is a necessary means to achieve human progress.^[5] Fascists commonly utilize paramilitary organizations for violent attacks on opponents or to overthrow a political system.^[6]

Italian Fascism promotes a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in corporative associations to collectively represent the nation's economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy.^[7] Italian Fascists claim that this economic system resolves and ends class conflict by creating class collaboration.^[8] It supports criminalization of strikes by employees and lockouts by employers as illegal acts it deems these acts as prejudicial to the national community as a whole.^[9]

Italian Fascism was declared by its leadership figures to be opposed to mainstream socialism because of its typical opposition to nationalism.^[10] It was declared to be opposed to liberalism, but made clear that it did not admire the political situation of Europe prior to the entrenchment of liberalism after the French Revolution of 1789, and stated that it was not seeking a reactionary restoration of the pre-1789 world that it considered to have been flawed, and that had been the cause of the rise of liberalism, but had a forward-looking direction.^[11] Italian Fascism was declared to be opposed to the reactionary conservatism developed by Joseph de Maistre.^[12]

1 Doctrine
2 Conditions precipitating Fascism
- 2.1 Nationalist discontent
- 2.2 Labor unrest
3 Fascism empowered
4 Italian Fascist mnemonics
5 See also
6 References
7 Sources
8 Further reading
9 External links

Doctrine [link]

Main article: Fascism

Giovanni Gentile: Philosophic father of Italian Fascism.

The Doctrine of Fascism (La dottrina del fascismo, 1932), by the Actualist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, is the official formulation of Italian Fascism, published under Benito Mussolini’s name in 1933.^[13] Gentile was intellectually influenced by Hegel, Plato, Benedetto Croce, and Giambattista Vico, as such, his Actual Idealism philosophy was the basis for Fascism.^[13] Hence, the Doctrine’s Weltanschauung proposes the world as action in the realm of Humanity — beyond the quotidian constrictions of contemporary political trend, by rejecting “perpetual peace” as fantastical, and accepting Man as a species continually at war; those who meet the challenge, achieve nobility.^[13] To wit, Actual Idealism generally accepted that conquerors were the men of historical consequence, e.g., the Roman Julius Caesar, the Greek Alexander the Great, the German Charlemagne, and the French (Corsican) Napoleon; the philosopher–intellectual Gentile was especially inspired by the Roman Empire (27 BC – AD 476, 1453), from whence derives Fascism, thus:^[13]

"The Fascist accepts and loves life; he rejects and despises suicide as cowardly. Life as he understands it means duty, elevation, conquest; life must be lofty and full, it must be lived for oneself but above all for others, both near bye and far off, present and future.|15px|15px|Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, 1933."^[14]

Therefore, in 1925, Benito Mussolini assumed the title Duce (Leader), derived from the Latin dux (leader), a Roman Republic military-command title. Moreover, although Fascist Italy (1922–43) is historically considered an authoritarian–totalitarian dictatorship, it retained the original “liberal democratic” government façade: the Grand Council of Fascism remained active as administrators; and King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy could — at his Crown’s risk — discretionarily dismiss Mussolini as Italian Prime Minister, as, in the event, he did.^[15]

Emblem of the National Fascist Party.

La dottrina del fascismo proposed an Italy of greater living standards under a single-party Fascist system, than under the multi-party liberal democratic government of 1920.^[16] As the Leader of the National Fascist Party (PNF — Partito Nazionale Fascista), Benito Mussolini said that democracy is “beautiful in theory; in practice, it is a fallacy”,^[17] and spoke of celebrating the burial of the “putrid corpse of liberty”.^[16] In 1923, to give Deputy Mussolini control of the pluralist parliamentary government of the Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946), an economist, the Baron Giacomo Acerbo proposed — and the Italian Parliament approved — the Acerbo Law, changing the electoral system from proportional representation to majority representation. The party who received the most votes (provided they possessed at least 25 per cent of cast votes), won two-thirds of the parliament; the remaining third was proportionately shared among the other parties — thus the Fascist manipulation of liberal democratic law that rendered Italy a single-party State.

In 1924, the PNF won the election with 65 per cent of the votes;^[18] yet the United Socialist Party refused to accept such a defeat — especially Deputy Giacomo Matteotti who, on 30 May 1924, in Parliament formally accused the PNF of electoral fraud, and reiterated his denunciations of PNF Blackshirt political violence, and was publishing The Fascisti Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination, a book substantiating his accusations.^[18]^[19] Consequently, on 24 June 1924, the Ceka (PNF secret police) assassinated the Parliament Deputy; of the five men arrested, Amerigo Dumini, aka Il Sicario del Duce (The Leader’s Assassin), was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, yet served only eleven months, and was freed under amnesty from King Victor Emmanuel III. Moreover, when the King supported Prime Minister Mussolini, the socialists cried “Foul!”, and unwisely quit Parliament in protest — leaving the Fascists to govern Italy.^[20] In that time, assassination was not yet the modus operandi norm; the Italian Fascist Duce usually disposed of opponents in the Imperial Roman way: political arrest punished with island banishment.^[21]

Conditions precipitating Fascism [link]

Italia Irredenta: Italian ethnic regions claimed by the Fascists in the 1930s: green: Nice, Ticino, and Dalmatia; red: Malta; violet: Corsica; Savoy and Corfu were later claimed.

Nationalist discontent [link]

After the First World War (1914–18), despite the Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946) being a full-partner Allied Power against the Central Powers, Italian nationalism claimed Italy was cheated in the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1919), thus the Allies had impeded Italy’s progress to becoming a “Great Power”.^[20] Thenceforth, the PNF successfully exploited that “slight” to Italian nationalism, in presenting Fascism as best-suited for governing the country, by successfully claiming that democracy, socialism, and liberalism were failed systems. The PNF assumed Italian government in 1922, consequent to the Fascist Leader Mussolini’s oratory and Blackshirt paramilitary political violence.

In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, the Allies compelled the Kingdom of Italy to yield to Yugoslavia the Croatian seaport of Fiume (Rijeka), a mostly-Italian city of little nationalist significance, until early 1919. Moreover, elsewhere, Italy then was excluded from the wartime secret Treaty of London (1915) it had concorded with the Triple Entente;^[22] wherein Italy was to leave the Triple Alliance and join the enemy, by declaring war against the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, in exchange for territories, at war’s end, upon which the Kingdom of Italy held claims. (see Italia irredenta)

In September 1919, the nationalist response of outraged war hero Gabriele d'Annunzio was declaring the establishment of the Italian Regency of Carnaro.^[23] To his independent Italian state, he installed himself as the Regent Duce (Leader), and promulgated the Carta del Carnaro (Charter of Carnaro, 8 September 1920 ), a politically-syncretic constitutional amalgamation of right-wing and left-wing anarchist, proto-fascist, and democratic republican politics, which much influenced the politico-philosophic development of early Italian Fascism. Consequent to the Treaty of Rapallo (1920) the metropolitan Italian military deposed the Regency of Duce D’Annunzio on Christmas 1920. In the development of the fascist model of government, Gabriele d’ Annunzio was a nationalist, not a fascist, whose legacy of political–praxis (“Politics as Theatre”) was stylistic (ceremony, uniform, harangue, chanting), not substantive, which Italian Fascism artfully developed as a government model.^[23]^[24]

Labor unrest [link]

A sociological study of violence in Italy (1919–1922) by text mining.^[25] Arrow width proportional to number of violent acts between social groups. (Click on large animated GIF image to see evolution)

Given Italian Fascism’s pragmatic political amalgamations of left-wing and right-wing socio-economic policies, discontented workers and peasants proved an abundant source of popular political power, especially because of peasant opposition to socialist agricultural collectivism. Thus armed, the former socialist Benito Mussolini oratorically inspired and mobilized country and working-class people: “We declare war on socialism, not because it is socialist, but because it has opposed nationalism.... ” Moreover, for campaign financing, in the 1920–21 period, the National Fascist Party also courted the industrialists and (historically-feudal) landowners, by appealing to their fears of left-wing socialist and Bolshevik labor politics and urban and rural strikes; the Fascists promised a good business climate of cost-effective labor, wage, and political stability; the Fascist Party was en route to power; the historian Charles F. Delzell reports:

"At first, the Fascists [PNF] were concentrated in Milan and a few other cities. They gained ground quite slowly, between 1919 and 1920; not until after the scare, brought about by the workers “occupation of the factories” in the late summer of 1920 did fascism become really widespread. The industrialists began to throw their financial support to it. Moreover, toward the end of 1920, fascism began to spread into the countryside, bidding for the support of large landowners, particularly in the area between Bologna and Ferrara, a traditional stronghold of the Left, and scene of frequent violence. Socialist and Catholic organizer of farm hands in that region, Venezia Giulia, Tuscany, and even distant Apulia, were soon attacked by [Black Shirt] squads of Fascists, armed with castor oil, blackjacks, and more lethal weapons. The era of Squadrismo, and nightly expeditions to burn Socialist and Catholic labor headquarters had begun."

File:Benito Mussolini Roman Salute.jpg

Il Duce: Prime Minister Benito Mussolini.

Fascism empowered [link]

The First World War (1914–18) inflated Italy’s economy with great debts, unemployment (aggravated by thousands of demobilised soldiers), social discontent featuring strikes, organised crime,^[20] and anarchist, Socialist, and Communist insurrections.^[26] When the elected Italian Liberal Party Government could not control Italy, the Revolutionary Fascist Party (Partito Fascista Rivoluzionario, PFR) Leader Benito Mussolini took matters in hand, combating those societal ills with the Blackshirts, paramilitary squads of First World War veterans and ex-socialists; Prime Ministers such as Giovanni Giolitti allowed the Fascists taking the law in hand.^[27]

The Liberal Government preferred Fascist class collaboration to the Communist Party of Italy’s bloody class conflict, should they assume government, as had Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the recent Russian Revolution of 1917.^[27]

The Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle (June 1919) of the PFR presented the politico-philosophic tenets of Fascism; it included women's suffrage, a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday, and reorganisation of public transport.^[28] Appeasing its initially strong feminist wing, the Fascist party actually bowed in November 1925, allowing the introduction of limited women's suffrage, much to the dismay of Fascist feminists.^[29]

The March on Rome coup d’ État: Mussolini and the PNF paramilitary Blackshirts, October 1922.

By the early 1920s, popular support for the PFR’s fight against Bolshevism numbered some 250,000 people. In 1921, the Fascisti (Fascists) metamorphosed into the PNF, and achieved political legitimacy when Benito Mussolini was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1922.^[20] Although the Liberal Party retained power, the governing prime ministries proved ephemeral, especially that of the fifth Prime Minister Luigi Facta, whose government proved vacillating.^[20]

To depose the weak parliamentary democracy, Deputy Mussolini (with military, business, and liberal right-wing support) launched the PNF March on Rome (27–29 October 1922) coup d’État, to oust Prime Minister Luigi Facta, and assume the government of Italy, to restore nationalist pride, re-start the economy, increase productivity with labor controls, remove economic business controls, and impose law and order.^[20] On 28 October, whilst the “March” occurred, King Victor Emmanuel III withdrew his support of Prime Minister Facta, and appointed PNF Leader Benito Mussolini as the sixth Prime Minister of Italy.

The March on Rome became a victory parade, the Fascists believed their success was revolutionary and traditionalist.^[30]^[31]

Economy [link]

Main article: Economy of Italy under Fascism, 1922–1943

1939 Fiat advertisement.

Until 1925, when the liberal economist Alberto de Stefani ended his tenure as Minister of Economics (1922–25), after having re-started the economy and balanced the national budget, the Italian Fascist Government’s economic policies were aligned with classical liberalism principles; inheritance, luxury, and foreign capital taxes were abolished;^[32] life insurance (1923),^[33] and the state communications monopolies were privatised, et cetera. Yet such pro-business enterprise policies apparently did not contradict the State’s financing of banks and industry.

One of Prime Minister Mussolini’s first acts was the 400-million-Lira financing of Gio. Ansaldo & C., one of the country’s most important engineering companies. Subsequent to the 1926 deflation crisis, banks such as the Banco di Roma (Bank of Rome), the Banco di Napoli (Bank of Naples), and the Banco di Sicilia (Bank of Sicily) also were state-financed.^[34] In 1924, a private business enterprise established the Unione Radiofonica Italiana (URI — Italian Radiophonic Union), as part of the Marconi group, to which the Italian Fascist Government granted official radio-broadcast monopoly; after the Second World War, URI became the Radio Audizioni Italiane (RAI — Italian Radio Audience, 1954–54), then the Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI — Italian Radiotelevision).

The inauguration of Littoria in 1932.

In addition, given the overwhelmingly rural nature of Italian economy in the period, agriculture was vital to Fascist economic policies and propaganda. To strengthen the domestic Italian production of grain, in 1925, the Fascist Government established protectionist policies that ultimately failed (see: the Battle for Grain); historian Denis Mack Smith reports that: “Success in this battle was... another illusory propaganda victory, won at the expense of the Italian economy in general, and consumers in particular.... Those who gained were the owners of the Latifondia, and the propertied classes in general.... [Mussolini’s] policy conferred a heavy subsidy on the Latifondisti.”^[35]

After 1929, the Fascist regime countered the Great Depression with massive public works programs, such as the draining of the Pontine Marshes, hydroelectricity development, railway improvement, and rearmament.^[36] In 1933, the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI — Institute for Industrial Reconstruction) was established to subsidize failing companies, and soon controlled important portions of the national economy via government-linked companies, among them Alfa Romeo. The Italian economy’s Gross National Product increased 2 per cent; automobile production was increased, especially that of the Fiat motor company,^[37] and the aeronautical industry was developing.^[20] Especially after the 1936 Society of Nation's sanctions against Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Mussolini strongly advocated agrarianism and autarchy as part of his economic "battles" for Land, the Lira, and Grain. As Prime Minister, Benito Mussolini physically participated with the workers in doing the work; the “politics as theatre” legacy of Gabriele D’ Anunzio yielded great propaganda images of Il Duce as “Man of the People”.^[38]^[39]

The Roman Question resolved: Vatican City-State territory, 1929

Internal relations [link]

In 1929, as Italian Head of Government, Benito Mussolini concluded the unresolved Church–State conflict of the Roman Question (La Questione romana, pending since the Risorgimento, 1815–71) with the Lateran Treaty (February 1929), between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See, establishing the Vatican City microstate in Rome. In exchange for diplomatic recognition of the Vatican City and compensated territorial losses, the Fascist Government established Roman Catholic religious education in every education level; the Vatican would diplomatically recognize the Italian Fascist State.^[16]^[40]

Moreover, to render the Italian people cosmopolitan, the Fascist Government applied every cultural artefact — from postage stamps to monumental architecture to sculpture — in making every social class conscious of Italy's cultural heritage, namely the Roman, Mediæval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, and the modern age.^[41]

Mussolini’s establishment of law and order to Italy and its society was praised by Winston Churchill,^[42] Sigmund Freud,^[43] George Bernard Shaw,^[44] and Thomas Edison,^[45] as the Fascist Government combated organised crime and the Mafia with violence and vendetta (honour).^[46]

The first victims of Fascism [link]

Slovene Anti-Fascist resistance and Italian war crimes [link]

On February 25, 1942, only two days after Italian Fascist regime established Gonars concentration camp that the first transport of 5,343 internees (1,643 of whom were children) arrived from - at the time already overpopulated - Rab concentration camp, from the Province of Ljubljana and from another camp in Monigo (near Treviso). In the occupied Slovenia with the emergence of the resistance, the Province of Ljubljana was subjected to brutal repression. Under the commander Mario Roatta's watch the violence against the Slovene civil population easily matched the German. To suppress the mounting resistance led by the Slovene Partisans, Italian soldiers adopted "draconian measures to intimidate the Slovene populations into silence by means of summary executions, hostage-taking, reprisals, internments into Rab and Gonars concentration camps and the burning of houses and villages". Mario Roatta's merciless suppression of partisan insurgency was not mitigated by his having saved the lives of Jews and Serbs (from the persecution of German Nazis and NDH). The "3C" pamphlet, tantamount to a declaration of war on civilians, involved him in war crimes.^[64]

External influence [link]

German stamp with Hitler and Mussolini. The text at the top says "Two peoples and one struggle."

The Italian Fascism government model was very influential beyond Italy; in the twenty-one-year intermarium of the First and Second world wars, many political scientists and philosophers sought ideological inspiration from Italy. Italian Fascism was copied by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party, the Russian Fascist Organization, the Romanian National Fascist Movement (the National Romanian Fascia, National Italo-Romanian Cultural and Economic Movement), the Dutch fascists based upon the Verbond van Actualisten journal of H. A. Sinclair de Rochemont and Alfred Haighton. The Sammarinese Fascist Party established an early Fascist government in San Marino, their politico-philosophic basis essentially was Italian Fascism.

Switzerland — pro-Nazi Colonel Arthur Fonjallaz of the National Front, became an ardent Mussolini admirer after visiting Italy in 1932. He advocated the Italian annexation of Switzerland, whilst receiving Fascist foreign aid.^[65] The country was host for two Italian politico-cultural activities: the International Centre for Fascist Studies (CINEF — Centre International d’ Études Fascistes), and the 1934 congress of the Action Committee for the Universality of Rome (CAUR — Comitato d’ Azione della Università de Roma).^[66]

Spain — The writer Ernesto Giménez Caballero, in Genio de España (The Genius of Spain, 1932) called for the Italian annexation of Spain, led by Mussolini presiding an international Latin Roman Catholic empire. He then progressed to close associated with Falangism, leading to discarding the Spanish annexation to Italy.^[67]

Italian Fascist mnemonics [link]

File:Fascist Propaganda Italy 1933.gif

Fascist propaganda, 1933: “Book and Musket make the Perfect Fascist, by loving God, the Fatherland, and the Family”. After 1929, the Cross of Lorraine and fasces represent the innate connection between Christianity and Fascism. Anno XI E.F. (Year Eleven of the Fascist Elevation).

Me ne frego (“I don’t give a damn!”): the Italian Fascist motto.
Libro e moschetto — fascista perfetto (“Book and Musket — Perfect Fascist”)
Viva la Morte (“Long live Death!”): sacrifice.
Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato (“Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”).^[68]
Credere, Obbedire, Combattere (“Believe, Obey, Fight”)
Se avanzo, seguitemi. Se indietreggio, uccidetemi. Se muoio, vendicatemi (“If I advance, follow me. If I retreat, kill me. If I die, avenge me”) Borrowed from French Royalist Gen. Henri de la Rochejaquelein.
Viva Il Duce(“Long live the Leader”)
La guerra è per l'uomo come La maternità è donna (War is to Man as Motherhood is to Woman.)^[69]
Boia chi molla (“who abandons the struggle is a hangman/executioner”), leaving the fight is seen as killing your own comrades. "Boia" was commonly used as an insult in Italy for centuries.
Molti nemici. Molto onore (“Many enemies. Much Honor”)
E' l'aratro che traccia il solco, ma è la spada che lo difende ("The plough cuts the furrow, but the sword defends it")
Dux mea lux ("The Leader is my light"), Latin phrase.
Duce a noi ("Duce, to us")^[70]
Mussolini ha sempre ragione ("Mussolini is always right")^[71]
Vincere e vinceremo ("To win, and we shall win!")

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References [link]

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^ Daniel Guérin, Fascism and Big Business Chapter IX, Second section, p.193 in the 1999 Syllepse Editions
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^ Pirjevec, Jože (2008). "The Strategy of the Occupiers". Resistance, Suffering, Hope: The Slovene Partisan Movement 1941–1945. p. 27. ISBN 978-961-6681-02-5. http://www.znaci.net/00001/179.pdf.
^ Regio decreto legge 10 Gennaio 1926, n. 17: Restituzione in forma italiana dei cognomi delle famiglie della provincia di Trento
^ Hrvoje Mezulić-Roman Jelić: O Talijanskoj upravi u Istri i Dalmaciji 1918-1943.: nasilno potalijančivanje prezimena, imena i mjesta, Dom i svijet, Zagreb, 2005., ISBN 953-238-012-4
^ Griffen, Roger (ed.). Fascism. Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. 59.
^ Montagu, Ashley. Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Rowman Altamira. ISBN 0-8039-4648-1. http://books.google.com/books?id=tkHqP3vgYi4C&pg=PA187&lpg=PA187&dq=%22+Nothing+will+ever+make+me+believe+that+biologically+pure+races+can+be+shown+to+exist+today%22&source=web&ots=ao7O_J0vr8&sig=22zZBSKlbcxbrBF1PXP3_PJygj0&hl=en.
^ James H. Burgwyn: "General Roatta's war against the partisans in Yugoslavia: 1942", Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Volume 9, Number 3, September 2004, pp. 314-329(16), link by IngentaConnect
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^ R. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 129
^ Philip Rees, Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890, p. 148
^ Used by Musolini in a speech before the Chamber of Deputies on 26 May 1927, Discorsi del 1927, Milano, Alpes, 1928, p. 157
^ Sarti, Roland. 1974. The Ax Within: Italian Fascism in Action, New York: New Viewpoints. p.187.
^ "EUROPE: Bread & Circuses". Time. 13 May 1946. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,776767,00.html.
^ World fascism: a historical encyclopedia

Sources [link]

"Labor Charter" (1927–1934)
Mussolini, Benito. Doctrine of Fascism which was published as part of the entry for fascismo in the Enciclopedia Italiana 1932.
Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence.

External links [link]

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Periodicals	La Conquista del Estado Das Reich Der Angriff Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung Deutsche Zeitung in Norwegen Deutsche Zeitung in den Niederlanden Figli d'Italia Fronten Gândirea Gioventù Fascista Je suis partout La France au travail Münchener Beobachter Novopress NS Månedshefte Norsk-Tysk Tidsskrift Das Schwarze Korps Der Stürmer Il Popolo d'Italia Sfarmă-Piatră Signal Vlajka* Völkischer Beobachter Nash Put'

Film	Der Sieg des Glaubens Tag der Freiheit: Unsere Wehrmacht Triumph of the Will

Sculpture	Allach

Related topics	Art of the Third Reich Fascist architecture Heroic realism Nazi architecture Nazism and cinema Nazi plunder

Organizations

Institutional	Ahnenerbe Chamber of Fasci and Corporations Grand Council of Fascism Imperial Way Faction Italian Nationalist Association Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen Quadrumvirs

Activist	Fascist Union of Youth German American Bund Russian Fascist Organization Union of Fascist Little Ones Union of Young Fascists – Vanguard (boys) Union of Young Fascists – Vanguard (girls)

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International	Axis powers NSDAP/AO ODESSA

History

1910s	Arditi Fascio

1920s	Aventine Secession Acerbo Law March on Rome Beer Hall Putsch Italian economic battles

1930s	March of the Iron Will German federal election, November 1932 German federal election, March 1933 Enabling Act 6 February 1934 crisis 1934 Montreux Fascist conference Spanish Civil War Anti-Comintern Pact

1940s	World War II The Holocaust Denazification Nuremberg Trials

Lists

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http://ru.wn.com/Итальянский фашизм

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http://de.wn.com/Italienischer Faschismus

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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Fascism

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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]

1 Early life
2 Creation of Fascism
3 March on Rome and early years in power
- 3.1 Acerbo Law
- 3.2 Squadristi violence
4 Building a dictatorship
5 Axis
6 Death
- 6.1 Mussolini's body
7 Personal life
- 7.1 Religious beliefs
  - 7.1.1 Atheism and anti-clericalism
  - 7.1.2 Lateran Pact
8 Legacy
9 In popular culture
10 See also
11 References
12 Bibliography
- 12.1 Writings of Mussolini
13 External links
14 Related information

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

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]

Main articles: Fascism and Italian Fascism

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]

Further information: March on Rome

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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File:Benito Mussolini Face.jpg

A young Mussolini in his early years in power.

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]

Main article: Economy of Italy under Fascism, 1922-1943

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.

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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]

Main article: Italian Fascism

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

File:Benito mussolini28.jpg

After taking power, Mussolini was often seen in military uniform.

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]

Main article: Second Italo-Abyssinian War

File:Mussolini standing on a tank.jpg

Il Duce standing on top of a tank.

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]

Main articles: Spanish Civil War and Foreign Involvement and Corpo Truppe Volontarie

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]

Main articles: Rome-Berlin Axis and Pact of Steel

File:Hitler and Mussolini June 1940.jpg

Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler in Munich, June 1940.

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":

“	But which race? Does there exist a German race? Has it ever existed? Will it ever exist? Reality, myth, or hoax of the theorists? Ah well, we respond, a Germanic race does not exist. Various movements. Curiosity. Stupor. We repeat. Does not exist. We don't say so. Scientists say so. Hitler says so.	”
—Benito Mussolini, 1934.^[84]

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

“	Race! It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today. Amusingly enough, not one of those who have proclaimed the "nobility" of the Teutonic race was himself a Teuton. Gobineau was a Frenchman, Chamberlain, an Englishman; Woltmann, a Jew; Lapouge, another Frenchman.	”
—Benito Mussolini, 1933.^[85]

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

“	Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil and Augustus.	”
—Benito Mussolini, 1934.^[86]^[87]

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:

“	[When the] city dies, the nation — deprived of the young life-blood of new generations — is now made up of people who are old and degenerate and cannot defend itself against a younger people which launches an attack on the now unguarded frontiers [...] This will happen, and not just to cities and nations, but on an infinitely greater scale: the whole White race, the Western race can be submerged by other coloured races which are multiplying at a rate unknown in our race.	”
—Benito Mussolini, 1928.^[88]

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:

“	The Racial Manifesto could have been avoided. It dealt with the scientific abstruseness of a few teachers and journalists, a conscientious German essay translated into bad Italian. It is far from what I have said, written and signed on the subject. I suggest that you consult the old issues of Il Popolo d'Italia. For this reason I am far from accepting (Alfred) Rosenberg's myth.	”
—Benito Mussolini, 1943.^[91]

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]

Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Italian Foreign Minister Count Ciano, as they prepared to sign the Munich Agreement

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

Main articles: Munich Agreement and Italian invasion of Albania

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]

Main article: Military history of Italy during World War II

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]

“	So long as the Duce lives, one can rest assured that Italy will seize every opportunity to achieve its imperialistic aims.	”
—Adolf Hitler, late November 1939^[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]

File:Pbadoglio.jpg

Marshal Pietro Badoglio succeeded Mussolini as Prime Minister.

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]

Main article: Italian Social Republic

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:

“	Yes, madam, I am finished. My star has fallen. I have no fight left in me. I work and I try, yet know that all is but a farce... I await the end of the tragedy and – strangely detached from everything – I do not feel any more an actor. I feel I am the last of spectators.	”
—Benito Mussolini, interviewed in early 1945 by Madeleine Mollier.^[125]

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]

References [link]

^ Image Description: Propaganda poster of Benito Mussolini, with caption "His Excellency Benito Mussolini, Head of Government, Leader of Fascism, and Founder of the Empire...".
^ Hakim, Joy (1995). A History of Us: War, Peace and all that Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509514-6.
^ John Dickie. Cosa Nostra: A History Of The Sicilian Mafia. Hampshire, England, UK; New York, New York, USA: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2004. Pp. 150-159.
^ Martin Blinkhorn. Mussolini And Fascist Italy. Third edition. New York, New York, USA: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 53.
^ MacGregor Knox. Mussolini unleashed, 1939-1941: Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy's Last War. Edition of 1999. Cambridge, England, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 122-123.
^ MacGregor Knox. Mussolini unleashed, 1939-1941: Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy's Last War. Edition of 1999. Cambridge, England, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 122-123.
^ MacGregor Knox. Mussolini unleashed, 1939-1941: Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy's Last War. Edition of 1999. Cambridge, England, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 122-127.
^ Viganò, Marino (2001), "Un'analisi accurata della presunta fuga in Svizzera" (in Italian), Nuova Storia Contemporanea 3
^ "1945: Italian partisans kill Mussolini". http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/28/newsid_3564000/3564529.stm. Retrieved 17 October 2011.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Mediterranean Fascism 1919–1945 Edited by Charles F. Delzel, Harper Rowe 1970, page 3
^ ^a ^b ^c "Benito Mussolini". Grolier.com. 8 January 2008. http://www.grolier.com/wwii/wwii_mussolini.html. ^{[dead link]}
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Living History 2; Chapter 2: Italy under Fascism. ISBN 1-84536-028-1
^ "Alessandro Mussolini". GeneAll.net. 8 January 2008. http://www.geneall.net/I/per_page.php?id=283037.
^ Gregor 1979, p. 29.
^ ^a ^b Gregor 1979, p. 31.
^ Mediterranean Fascism by Charles F. Delzel page 96
^ ^a ^b Mauro Cerutti: Benito Mussolini in .php German, .php French and .php Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.
^ Haugen, Brenda (2007). Benito Mussolini. Compass Point Books. ISBN 978-0-7565-1892-9. http://books.google.com/?id=rleP5CVe070C&pg=PA24.
^ "Mussolini: il duce". ThinkQuest.org. 24 October 2009. http://library.thinkquest.org/19592/Persons/mussolin.htm.
^ "The Life of Benito Mussolini" by Margherita G. Sarfatti, p. 156
^ taken from WorldCat's entry for this book's title.
^ Mediterranean Fascism 1919–1945 Edited by Charles F. Delzel, Harper Rowe 1970, bottom of page 3
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Mediterranean Fascism 1919–1945 Edited by Charles F. Delzel, Harper Rowe 1970, page 4
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Golomb 2002, p. 249.
^ Tucker 2005, p. 1001.
^ Tucker 2005, p. 884.
^ Tucker 2005, p. 335.
^ Tucker 2005, p. 219.
^ ^a ^b Tucker 2005, p. 826.
^ Tucker 2005, p. 209.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Gregor 1979, p. 189.
^ Tucker 2005, p. 596.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Emile Ludwig. Nine Etched in Life. Ayer Company Publishers, 1934 (original), 1969. p. 321.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Gregor 1979, p. 191.
^ Mediterranean Fascism 1919–1945 Edited by Charles F. Delzel, Harper Rowe 1970, page 6.
^ Dennis Mack Smith. 1997. Modern Italy; A Political History. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. p. 284.
^ ^a ^b Gregor 1979, p. 200.
^ Gregor 1979, pp. 191-192.
^ ^a ^b Gregor 1979, p. 192.
^ ^a ^b Gregor 1979, p. 193.
^ Gregor 1979, p. 195.
^ Gregor 1979, pp. 193, 195.
^ Gregor 1979, pp. 195-196.
^ ^a ^b ^c Gregor 1979, p. 196.
^ ^a ^b Mussolini: A Study In Power, Ivone Kirkpatrick, Hawthorne Books, 1964. ISBN 0-8371-8400-2
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Owen, Richard (13 January 2005). "Power-mad Mussolini sacrificed wife and son". The Times (UK). http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article411675.ece. Retrieved 14 May 2009.
^ Kington, Tom (13 October 2009). "Recruited by MI5: the name's Mussolini. Benito Mussolini – Documents reveal Italian dictator got start in politics in 1917 with help of £100 weekly wage from MI5". Guardian (UK). http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/13/benito-mussolini-recruited-mi5-italy. Retrieved 14 October 2009.
^ "The Rise of Benito Mussolini". 8 January 2008. http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/ww2timeline/Prelude05.html.
^ "We're all fascists now". Salon.com. 8 January 2008. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/01/11/goldberg/print.html.
^ "The Rise of Benito Mussolini". http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/ww2timeline/Prelude05.html.
^ Giovanni Gentile; Benito Mussolini (1932). "La Dottrina del fascismo [The Doctrine of Fascism]" (in Italian). Lit Gloss, University of Buffalo. Section I.8.. http://litgloss.buffalo.edu/mussolini/text.shtml. Retrieved 21 March 2011. "So fascism is against socialism, which stiffens the historical movement in the class struggle and ignores the unity of the state that the classes merged into one economic and moral reality, and similarly, it is against the class unionism. (Google Translate from: Perciò il fascismo è contro il socialismo che irrigidisce il movimento storico nella lotta di classe e ignora l'unità statale che le classi fonde in una sola realtà economica e morale; e analogamente, è contro il sindacalismo classista.)" ^{[citation needed]}
^ Vox Day (28 June 2004). "Flunking Fascism 101". VoxDay.net. http://voxday.net/archive/2004/062804.html. Retrieved 21 March 2011. ^{[citation needed]}
^ Moseley 2004, p. 39.
^ Sharma, Urmila. Western Political Thought. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd, 1998. p. 66.
^ Sharma, Urmila. Western Political Thought. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd, 1998. pp. 66–67.
^ Kallis 2002, pp. 48-51.
^ Kallis 2002, pp. 50-51.
^ Kallis 2002, pp. 48-50.
^ Kallis 2002, p. 50.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g Kallis 2002, p. 52.
^ Roland Sarti (8 January 2008). "Fascist Modernization in Italy: Traditional or Revolutionary". The American Historical Review 75 (4): 1029–1045. DOI:10.2307/1852268. JSTOR 1852268.
^ "Mussolini's Italy". Appstate.edu. 8 January 2008. http://www.appstate.edu/~brantzrw/history3134/mussolini.html. ^{[dead link]}
^ Macdonald, Hamish (1999). Mussolini and Italian Fascism. Nelson Thornes. ISBN 0-7487-3386-8. http://books.google.com/?id=221W9vKkWrcC&pg=PT17&lpg=PT17&dq=%22third+way%22+mussolini.
^ "Ha'aretz Newspaper, Israel, 'The Jewish Mother of Fascism". Haaretz. Israel. Archived from the original on 17 June 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080617050824/http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=735492. Retrieved 13 March 2009. ^{[dead link]}
^ Weinberg 2005, p. 18.
^ Speech of the 30th of May 1924 the last speech of Matteotti, from it.wikisource
^ ^a ^b Paxton, Robert (2004). The Anatomy of Fascism. New York City: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 1-4000-4094-9.
^ The Times, Thursday, 8 April 1926; p. 12; Issue 44240; column A
^ Cannistraro, Philip (March 1996). "Mussolini, Sacco-Vanzetti, and the Anarchists: The Transatlantic Context". The Journal of Modern History (The University of Chicago Press) 68 (1): 55. DOI:10.1086/245285. JSTOR 2124332.
^ "Father inspired Zamboni. But Parent of Mussolini's Assailant Long Ago Gave Up Anarchism. Blood Shed in Riots throughout Italy". The New York Times. 3 November 1926. http://www.proquest.com. Retrieved 6 September 2008. ^{[dead link]}
^ "The attempted assassination of Mussolini in Rome". Libcom.org. 10 September 2006. http://libcom.org/history/1926-attempted-assassination-mussolini. Retrieved 13 March 2009.
^ Andrew (3 March 2005). "Remembering the Anarchist Resistance to fascism". Anarkismo.net. http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=87. Retrieved 6 November 2010.
^ Melchior Seele (11 September 2006). "1931: The murder of Michael Schirru". Libcom.org. http://www.libcom.org/history/articles/murder-michael-schirru. Retrieved 13 March 2009.
^ Arrigo Petacco, L'uomo della provvidenza: Mussolini, ascesa e caduta di un mito, Milano, Mondadori, 2004, p. 190
^ Göran Hägg: Mussolini, en studie i makt
^ Clark, Martin, Modern Italy, Pearson Longman, 2008, p.322
^ The Vampire Economy: Italy, Germany, and the US, Jeffrey Herbener, Mises Institute, 13 October 2005
^ Comic escapes prosecution for insulting pope (Oddly Enough) Reuters, (Friday 19 September 2008 1:15 pm EDT) By Phil Stewart
^ "A Brief History of Italy: From the Etruscans to today". LifeinItaly.com. 8 January 2008. http://www.lifeinitaly.com/history/. ^{[dead link]}
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d "Ethiopia 1935–36". icrc.org. 8 January 2008. http://www.icrc.org/Web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/htmlall/5RUHGM?OpenDocument&View=defaultBody&style=custo_print.
^ Speech delivered by Premier Benito Mussolini. Rome, Italy, 23 February 1941
^ "If the Duce were to die, it would be a great misfortune for Italy. As I walked with him in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I could easily compare his profile with that of the Roman busts, and I realised he was one of the Caesars. There's no doubt at all that Mussolini is the heir of the great men of that period." Hitler's Table Talk
^ ^a ^b Cannistraro, P. V. (April 1972). "Mussolini's Cultural Revolution: Fascist or Nationalist?". Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE Journals Online) 7 (3): 115–139. DOI:10.1177/002200947200700308. http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/7/3/115. Retrieved 23 March 2011. (Subscription required)
^ Gillette, Aaron (2002). Racial Theories in Fascist Italy. Routledge. p. 45. ISBN 0-415-25292-X. http://books.google.com/?id=6Y8XRZAdv9IC&pg=PA45&lpg=PA42&dq=mussolini+thoughts+on+race.
^ Gillette, Aaron (2002). Racial Theories in Fascist Italy. Routledge. p. 44. ISBN 0-415-25292-X. http://books.google.com/?id=6Y8XRZAdv9IC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=mussolini+thoughts+on+race.
^ Institute of Jewish Affairs (2007). Hitler's ten-year war on the Jews. Kessinger Publishing. p. 283. ISBN 1-4325-9942-9. http://books.google.com/?id=vCA4AAAAIAAJ&q=%22Thirty+centuries+of+history+allow+us+to+look+with+supreme+pity%22.
^ Video clip from the speech
^ Griffen, Roger (ed.). Fascism. Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. 59.
^ Hollander, Ethan J (1997) (PDF). Italian Fascism and the Jews. University of California. ISBN 0-8039-4648-1. http://weber.ucsd.edu/~ejhollan/Haaretz%20-%20Ital%20fascism%20-%20English.PDF.
^ Peter Egill Brownfeld (Fall 2003). "The Italian Holocaust: The Story of an Assimilated Jewish Community". The American Council for Judaism. http://www.acjna.org/acjna/articles_detail.aspx?id=300. Retrieved 23 March 2011. "Ovazza started a Jewish fascist newspaper, "La Nostra Bandiera" (Our Flag) in an effort to show that the Jews were among the regime's most loyal followers."
^ Gillette, Aaron (2002). Racial Theories in Fascist Italy. Routledge. p. 95. ISBN 0-415-25292-X. http://books.google.com/?id=6Y8XRZAdv9IC&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=mussolini+thoughts+on+race.
^ Arielli, Nir (9 June 2010). Fascist Italy and the Middle East, 1933–40. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 92–99. ISBN 978-0-230-23160-3.
^ Stang 1999, p. 172.
^ Stang 1999.
^ Stang 1999, pp. 172-174.
^ Stang 1999, pp. 173-174.
^ ^a ^b Stang 1999, pp. 174-175.
^ Lowe, CJ (1967). Italian Foreign Policy 1870–1940. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-26597-5. http://books.google.com/?id=5Cfuax6XHF0C&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=irredentism.
^ ^a ^b Kallis 2002, p. 153.
^ ^a ^b Kallis 2002, p. 97.
^ "The Italo-German Alliance, May 22, 1939". astro.temple.edu. 8 January 2008. http://astro.temple.edu/~rimmerma/Italo_German_alliance_1939.htm.
^ "Victor Emanuel III". Questia.com. 8 January 2008. http://www.questia.com/library/encyclopedia/victor_emmanuel_iii.jsp.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Knox, MacGregor (1986). Mussolini Unleashed, 1939–1941: Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy's Last War. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-33835-2. http://books.google.com/?id=_PwCu_D-HiUC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=mussolini+non-belligerent.
^ ^a ^b "Italy Declares War". ThinkQuest.org. 8 January 2008. http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0212881/italdewa.html.
^ Samson, Anne (1967). Britain, South Africa and East African Campaign: International Library of Colonial History. I B Tauris & Co Ltd. ISBN 0-415-26597-5. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1845110404.
^ "1940 World War II Timeline". WorldWarIIHistory.info. 8 January 2008. http://www.worldwariihistory.info/1940.html.
^ Mollo, Andrew (1987). The Armed Forces of World War II. I B Tauris & Co Ltd. ISBN 978-0-517-54478-5. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0517544784.
^ "World War II: Operation Compass". About.com. 8 January 2008. http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/worldwarii/p/compass.htm.
^ "Speech Delivered by Premier Benito Mussolini". IlBiblio.org. 8 January 2008. http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1941/410223a.html.
^ "The Invasion and Battle for Greece (Operation Marita)". Feldgrau.com. 8 January 2008. http://www.feldgrau.com/greecewar.html.
^ Weinberg 2005, p. 276.
^ Weinberg 2005, pp. 276-277.
^ ^a ^b Weinberg 2005, p. 277.
^ Trial of German Major War Criminals, vol. 3, p. 398.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Moseley 2004.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Whittam, John (2005). Fascist Italy. Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-4004-3. http://books.google.com/?id=hHgMm6APG_0C&dq=%22Vatican+Radio%22+%22Radio+London%22+fascist.
^ "Modern era". BestofSicily.com. 8 January 2008. http://www.bestofsicily.com/history3.htm.
^ ^a ^b ^c Shirer, William (1960). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York City: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-72868-7.
^ ^a ^b Annussek, Greg (2005). Hitler's Raid to Save Mussolini. Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-81396-2. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0306813963.
^ Moseley(2004), p. 23
^ ^a ^b Moseley, Ray (2004). Mussolini: The Last 600 Days of Il Duce. Taylor Trade. ISBN 1-58979-095-2. http://books.google.com/?id=UmxaWvOL_IgC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=Campo+Imperatore+abruzzo+mussolini.
^ A copy of an existing document is available online. It reads
"In addition to my (...) order of the commander of the Greater German Reich in Italy and the organisation of the occupied Italian area from 10 September 1943 I determine:
The supreme commanders in the Operational Zone Adriatic Coast consisting of the provinces of Friaul, Görz, Triest, Istrien, Fiume, Quarnero, Laibach, and in the Prealpine Operations Zone consisting of the provinces of Bozen, Trient and Belluno receive the fundamental instructions for their activity from me.
Führer's headquarters, 10 September 1943.
The Führer Gen. Adolf Hitler".
See second document at
http://www.karawankengrenze.at/ferenc/document/show/id/317?symfony=ad81b9f2cd1e66a7c973073ed0532df1
^ Nicola Cospito; Hans Werner Neulen (1992). Salò-Berlino: l'alleanza difficile. La Repubblica Sociale Italiana nei documenti segreti del Terzo Reich. Mursia. p. 128. ISBN 88-425-1285-0.
^ Moseley (2004), p. 26.
^ "The twilight of Italian fascism". EnterStageRight.com. 8 January 2008. http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0105/0105mussolini.htm.
^ Toland, John. (1966). The Last 100 Days Random House, p. 504, OCLC 294225
^ "Benito Mussolini". Celebritymorgue.com. 28 April 1945. http://www.celebritymorgue.com/benito-mussolini/. Retrieved 13 March 2009.
^ Time Magazine, 7 May 1945
^ Video: Beaten Nazis Sign Historic Surrender, 1945/05/14 (1945). Universal Newsreel. 1945. http://www.archive.org/details/1945-05-14_Beaten_Nazis_Sign_Historic_Surrender. Retrieved February 20, 2012.
^ Quoted in "Mussolini: A New Life", p. 276 by Nicholas Burgess Farrell – 2004
^ "The tomb". findagrave.com. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pv&GRid=11638&PIpi=91458.
^ Peter York. Dictator Style. Chronicle Books, San Francisco (2006), ISBN 0-8118-5314-4. pp. 17–18.
^ ^a ^b D.M. Smith 1982, p. 1
^ ^a ^b ^c D.M. Smith 1982, p. 8
^ D.M. Smith 1982, pp. 2–3
^ ^a ^b D.M. Smith 1982, p. 12
^ ^a ^b ^c D.M. Smith 1982, p. 15
^ Rachele Mussolini 1974, p. 129
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h D.M. Smith 1982, p. 162-163
^ ^a ^b Roberts, Jeremy (2006). Benito Mussolini. Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, p. 60.
^ Neville, Peter (2004). Mussolini: Routledge Historical Biographies. New York: Psychology Press, p. 84.
^ Townley, Edward (2002). Mussolini and Italy. New York: Heinemann Press, p. 49.
^ D.M. Smith 1982, pp. 222–223
^ ^a ^b D.M. Smith 1982, p. 311
^ Rachele Mussolini 1974, p. 131
^ Rachele Mussolini 1974, p. 135
^ Jim Heddlesten. "Commando Supremo: Events of 1941". Comandosupremo.com. http://www.comandosupremo.com/1941.html. Retrieved 13 March 2009.
^ The History of the Beano. Dundee, Scotland: D.C. Thomson & Co. Ltd.. 2008. pp. 77–78. ISBN 978-1-902407-73-9.

Bibliography [link]

2007. Mussolini's Cities: Internal Colonialism in Italy, 1930–1939, Cambria Press.
Bosworth, R.J.B. 2002. Mussolini. London, Hodder.
Bosworth, R.J.B. 2006. "Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship 1915–1945". London, Allen Lane.
Corvaja, Santi. 2001. Hitler and Mussolini. The Secret Meetings. Enigma. ISBN 1-929631-00-6
Daldin, Rudolph S. The Last Centurion. http://www.benito-mussolini.com ISBN 0-921447-34-5
Renzo De Felice. 1995. Mussolini. Torino: Einaudi.
Golomb, Jacob; Wistrich, Robert S. 2002. Nietzsche, godfather of fascism?: on the uses and abuses of a philosophy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Farrell, Nicholas. 2003. Mussolini: A New Life. London: Phoenix Press, ISBN 1-84212-123-5.
Garibaldi, Luciano. 2004. Mussolini. The Secrets of his Death. Enigma. ISBN 1-929631-23-5
Hibbert, Christopher. Il Duce.
Kallis, Aristotle. 2000. Fascist Ideology. London: Routledge.
Lowe, Norman. Italy, 1918–1945: the first appearance of fascism. In Mastering Modern World History.
Morris, Terry; Murphy, Derrick. Europe 1870–1991.
Moseley, Ray. 2004. Mussolini: The Last 600 Days of Il Duce. Dallas: Taylor Trade Publishing.
Mussolini, Rachelle. 1977 [1974]. Mussolini: An Intimate Biography. Pocket Books. Originally published by William Morrow, ISBN 0-671-81272-6, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-1129
O'Brien, Paul. 2004. Mussolini in the First World War: The Journalist, the Soldier, the Fascist. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
Painter, Borden W. Jr., 2005. Mussolini's Rome: rebuilding the Eternal City,
Petacco, Arrigo (ed.). 1998. L'archivio segreto di Mussolini. Mondadori. ISBN 88-04-44914-4
Smith, Denis Mack. 1982. Mussolini: A biography, Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. ISBN 0-394-50694-4
Sternhell, Zeev; Sznajder, Mario; Asheri, Maia (1999). [The birth of Fascist ideology, from cultural rebellion to political revolution]. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stang, G. Bruce (1999). "War and peace: Mussolini’s road to Munich". In Lukes, Igor; Goldstein, Erik. The Munich crisis 1938: prelude to World War II. London: Frank Cass. pp. 160-190.
Tucker, Spencer. 2005. Encyclopedia of World War I: a political, social, and military history. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO.
Weinberg, Gerhard. 2005. A World in arms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Writings of Mussolini [link]

Giovanni Hus, il Veridico(Jan Hus, True prophet), Rome (1913). Published in America as John Hus (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1929). Republished by the Italian Book Co., NY (1939) as John Hus, the Veracious.
The Cardinal's Mistress (trans. Hiram Motherwell, New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1928)
There is an essay on "The Doctrine of Fascism" written by Benito Mussolini that appeared in the 1932 edition of the Enciclopedia Italiana, and excerpts can be read at Doctrine of Fascism. There are also links to the complete text.
La Mia Vita ("My Life"), Mussolini's autobiography written upon request of the American Ambassador in Rome (Child). Mussolini, at first not interested, decided to dictate the story of his life to Arnaldo Mussolini, his brother. The story covers the period up to 1929, includes Mussolini's personal thoughts on Italian politics and the reasons that motivated his new revolutionary idea. It covers the march on Rome and the beginning of the dictatorship and includes some of his most famous speeches in the Italian Parliament (Oct 1924, Jan 1925).
Vita di Arnaldo, Milano, Il Popolo d'Italia, 1932.
Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini, 12 voll., Milano, Hoepli, 1934-1940.
Parlo con Bruno, Milano, Il Popolo d'Italia, 1941.
Storia di un anno. Il tempo del bastone e della carota, Milano, Mondadori, 1944.
From 1951 to 1962 Edoardo and Duilio Susmel worked for the publisher "La Fenice" in order to print opera omnia (the complete works) of Mussolini in 35 volumes.

External links [link]

Find more about Benito Mussolini on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
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	Learning resources from Wikiversity
	News stories from Wikinews
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Textbooks from Wikibooks

Benito Mussolini in pictures
Comando Supremo: Benito Mussolini
Did Mussolini really make the trains run on time?
Is Mussolini quote on corporatism accurate?
Benito Mussolini Speeches
Michael Schirru's failed attempt on Mussolini's life
Il Duce 'sought Hitler ban' September 2003 BBC News
Mussolini shaking hands with King George V. of England, 1923, The Illustrated London News
Mussolini's Piazza Augusto Imperatore
Time Magazine, 5 April 1937 (5 April 1937). "Islam, Duce, and Duke.". http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,757543,00.html. Retrieved 19 August 2009.
Time Magazine, 7 May 1945 (7 May 1945). "Death in Milan.". http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,797481-1,00.html. Retrieved 20 August 2009.

Related information [link]

Political offices
Preceded by Luigi Facta	Prime Minister of Italy 1922 – 1943	Succeeded by Pietro Badoglio
Preceded by Carlo Schanzer	Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs 1922 – 1929	Succeeded by Dino Grandi
Preceded by Dino Grandi	Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs 1932 – 1936	Succeeded by Galeazzo Ciano
Preceded by Galeazzo Ciano	Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs 1943	Succeeded by Raffaele Guariglia
Preceded by Paolino Taddei	Italian Minister of the Interior 1922 – 1924	Succeeded by Luigi Federzoni
Preceded by Luigi Federzoni	Italian Minister of the Interior 1926 – 1943	Succeeded by Bruno Fornaciari
Preceded by New Title	Head of State of the Italian Social Republic 1943 – 1945	Succeeded by End Title
Preceded by New Title	Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Italian Social Republic 1943 – 1945	Succeeded by End Title

Fascism

Theory

Core tenets	Nationalism Imperialism Authoritarianism Single party state Dictatorship Social Darwinism Social interventionism Indoctrination Proletarian nation Propaganda Anti-intellectualism Eugenics Heroism Militarism Economic interventionism Anti-communism

Topics	Definitions Economics Fascism and ideology Fascism worldwide Symbolism

Ideas	Actual Idealism Class collaboration Corporatism Heroic capitalism National Socialism National syndicalism State capitalism State socialism Supercapitalism Third Position Totalitarianism

Movements

Africa	Greyshirts Ossewabrandwag

Asia	Brit HaBirionim Ganap Party Sakurakai Tōhōkai

Western Europe	Black Front (Netherlands) Breton Social-National Workers' Movement British Fascists British People's Party (1939) British Union of Fascists La Cagoule Clerical People's Party Faisceau Falange Flemish National Union French Popular Party General Dutch Fascist League Imperial Fascist League National Fascisti National Front (Switzerland) Nationalist Party (Iceland) National Socialist Dutch Workers Party National Socialist League National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands National Socialist Movement of Norway National Union (Portugal) New Party (UK) Rexism

Central Europe	Arrow Cross Party Austrian National Socialism Fatherland's Front Hungarian National Socialist Party Italian Fascism Italian Social Republic Nasjonal Samling National Fascist Community National Fascist Party National Radical Camp Falanga National Socialist Bloc National Socialist Workers' Party (Sweden) Nazism Nazi Party Pērkonkrusts Republican Fascist Party Sammarinese Fascist Party Sudeten German Party Ustaše ZBOR

Eastern Europe	Albanian Fascist Party Crusade of Romanianism Greek National Socialist Party Iron Guard* Lapua Movement National Fascist Movement National Italo-Romanian Cultural and Economic Movement National Social Movement (Bulgaria) National Romanian Fascia National Renaissance Front Patriotic People's Movement (Finland) Romanian Front Russian Fascist Party Russian Women's Fascist Movement Slovak People's Party Union of Bulgarian National Legions

North America	Fascism in Canada Canadian Union of Fascists Parti national social chrétien Red Shirts (Mexico) Gold shirts German American Bund Silver Legion of America

South America	Falangism in Latin America Brazilian Integralism Bolivian Socialist Falange National Socialist Movement of Chile Revolutionary Union

People

Works

Literature	The Doctrine of Fascism Fascist manifesto Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals Mein Kampf My Life The Myth of the Twentieth Century Revolt Against the Modern World Zweites Buch Zaveshchanie russkogo fashista

Periodicals	La Conquista del Estado Das Reich Der Angriff Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung Deutsche Zeitung in Norwegen Deutsche Zeitung in den Niederlanden Figli d'Italia Fronten Gândirea Gioventù Fascista Je suis partout La France au travail Münchener Beobachter Novopress NS Månedshefte Norsk-Tysk Tidsskrift Das Schwarze Korps Der Stürmer Il Popolo d'Italia Sfarmă-Piatră Signal Vlajka* Völkischer Beobachter Nash Put'

Film	Der Sieg des Glaubens Tag der Freiheit: Unsere Wehrmacht Triumph of the Will

Sculpture	Allach

Related topics	Art of the Third Reich Fascist architecture Heroic realism Nazi architecture Nazism and cinema Nazi plunder

Organizations

Institutional	Ahnenerbe Chamber of Fasci and Corporations Grand Council of Fascism Imperial Way Faction Italian Nationalist Association Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen Quadrumvirs

Activist	Fascist Union of Youth German American Bund Russian Fascist Organization Union of Fascist Little Ones Union of Young Fascists – Vanguard (boys) Union of Young Fascists – Vanguard (girls)

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International	Axis powers NSDAP/AO ODESSA

History

1910s	Arditi Fascio

1920s	Aventine Secession Acerbo Law March on Rome Beer Hall Putsch Italian economic battles

1930s	March of the Iron Will German federal election, November 1932 German federal election, March 1933 Enabling Act 6 February 1934 crisis 1934 Montreux Fascist conference Spanish Civil War Anti-Comintern Pact

1940s	World War II The Holocaust Denazification Nuremberg Trials

Lists

Anti-fascists Books about Hitler British fascist parties Fascist movements by country (A-F G-M N-T U-Z) Nazi ideologues Nazi leaders Speeches by Hitler SS personnel

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This article is about the Jewish people. For their religion, law and culture, see Judaism.

"Jew" redirects here. For other uses, see Jew (disambiguation).

Jews
Hebrew: יהודים‎ (Yehudim)

Total population

13,428,300 ^[1]

Regions with significant populations

Israel 5,703,700 ^[1]

United States	5,275,000	^[1]
France	483,500	^[1]
Canada	375,000	^[1]
United Kingdom	292,000	^[1]
Russia	205,000	^[1]
Argentina	182,300	^[1]
Germany	119,000	^[1]
Australia	107,500	^[1]
Brazil	95,600	^[1]
Ukraine	71,500	^[1]
South Africa	70,800	^[1]
Hungary	48,600	^[1]
Mexico	39,400	^[1]
Belgium	30,300	^[1]
Netherlands	30,000	^[1]
Italy	28,400	^[1]
Chile	20,500	^[1]

Languages

Predominant spoken languages:
Hebrew · English · Russian · the vernacular languages of other countries in the diaspora

Historical languages:
Yiddish · Ladino · Judeo-Arabic · others

Sacred languages:
Biblical Hebrew · Aramaic

Religion

Judaism

Jews and Judaism
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The Jews (Hebrew: יְהוּדִים‎‎ ISO 259-3 Yhudim Israeli pronunciation [jehuˈdim]), also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and an ethnoreligious group, originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation.^[2]^[3]^[4] Converts to Judaism, whose status as Jews within the Jewish ethnos is equal to those born into it, have been absorbed into the Jewish people throughout the millennia.

In Jewish tradition, Jewish ancestry is traced to the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the second millennium BCE. The modern State of Israel defines itself as a Jewish state in its Basic Laws, and Israel's Law of Return states: "Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh."^[5] Israel is the only country where Jews are a majority of the population. Jews achieved political autonomy twice before in ancient history. The first of these periods lasted from 1350^[6] to 586 BCE, and encompassed the periods of the Judges, the United Monarchy, and the Divided Monarchy of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, ending with the destruction of the First Temple. The second was the period of the Hasmonean Kingdom spanning from 140 to 37 BCE. Since the destruction of the First Temple, most Jews have lived in diaspora.^[7] A minority in every country in which they live (except Israel), they have frequently experienced persecution throughout history, resulting in a population that has fluctuated both in numbers and distribution over the centuries.

As of 2010^[update], the world Jewish population was estimated at 13.4 million by the North American Jewish Data Bank,^[1] or roughly 0.2% of the total world population. According to this report, about 42.5% of all Jews reside in Israel (5.7 million), and 39.3% in the United States (5.3 million), with most of the remainder living in Europe (1.5 million) and Canada (0.4 million).^[1] These numbers include all those who consider themselves Jews, whether or not they are affiliated with a Jewish organization. The total world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure. In addition to issues with census methodology, there are halakhic disputes regarding who is a Jew and secular, political, and ancestral identification factors that may affect the figure considerably.^[8]

Name and etymology [link]

Main article: Jew (word)

The English word Jew continues Middle English Gyw, Iewe, a loan from Old French giu, earlier juieu, ultimately from Latin Iudaeum. The Latin Iudaeus simply means Judaean, "from the land of Judaea". The Latin term itself, like the corresponding Greek Ἰουδαῖος, is a loan from Aramaic Y'hūdāi, corresponding to Hebrew: יְהוּדִי‎‎, Yehudi (sg.); יְהוּדִים, Yehudim (pl.), in origin the term for a member of the tribe of Judah or the people of the kingdom of Judah. The name of both the tribe and kingdom derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob.^[9]

The Hebrew word for Jew, יְהוּדִי ISO 259-3 Yhudi, is pronounced [jehuˈdi], with the stress on the final syllable, in Israeli Hebrew, in its basic form.^[10]

The Ladino name is ג׳ודיו, Djudio (sg.); ג׳ודיוס, Djudios (pl.); Yiddish: ייִד Yid (sg.); ייִדן, Yidn (pl.).

The etymological equivalent is in use in other languages, e.g., "Yahoud"/"Yahoudi" (Arabic: يهود/يهودي‎) in Arabic language, "Jude" in German, "judeu" in Portuguese, "juif" in French, "jøde" in Danish, "judío" in Spanish, "joodse" in Dutch, etc., but derivations of the word "Hebrew" are also in use to describe a Jew, e.g., in Italian (Ebreo), in Persian ("Ebri/Ebrani" (Persian: عبری/عبرانی‎)) and Russian (Еврей, Yevrey).^[11] The German word "Jude" is pronounced [ˈjuːdə], the corresponding adjective "jüdisch" [ˈjyːdɪʃ] (Jewish) is the origin of the word "Yiddish".^[12] (See Jewish ethnonyms for a full overview.)

According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (2000):

It is widely recognized that the attributive use of the noun Jew, in phrases such as Jew lawyer or Jew ethics, is both vulgar and highly offensive. In such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a practice that carries risks of its own. In a sentence such as There are now several Jews on the council, which is unobjectionable, the substitution of a circumlocution like Jewish people or persons of Jewish background may in itself cause offense for seeming to imply that Jew has a negative connotation when used as a noun.^[13]

Origins [link]

Judaism [link]

Main article: Judaism

Judaism guides its adherents in both practice and belief, and has been called not only a religion, but also a "way of life,"^[15] which has made drawing a clear distinction between Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish identity rather difficult. Throughout history, in eras and places as diverse as the ancient Hellenic world,^[16] in Europe before and after The Age of Enlightenment (see Haskalah),^[17] in Islamic Spain and Portugal,^[18] in North Africa and the Middle East,^[18] India,^[19] and China,^[20] or the contemporary United States^[21] and Israel,^[22] cultural phenomena have developed that are in some sense characteristically Jewish without being at all specifically religious. Some factors in this come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews or specific communities of Jews with their surroundings, others from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community, as opposed to from the religion itself. This phenomenon has led to considerably different Jewish cultures unique to their own communities, each as authentically Jewish as the next.^[23]

Who is a Jew?[link]

Main article: Who is a Jew?

Judaism shares some of the characteristics of a nation, an ethnicity, a religion, and a culture, making the definition of who is a Jew vary slightly depending on whether a religious or national approach to identity is used.^[24] Generally, in modern secular usage, Jews include three groups: people who were born to a Jewish family regardless of whether or not they follow the religion; those who have some Jewish ancestral background or lineage (sometimes including those who do not have strictly matrilineal descent); and people without any Jewish ancestral background or lineage who have formally converted to Judaism and therefore are followers of the religion.^[25]

Historical definitions of Jewish identity have traditionally been based on halakhic definitions of matrilineal descent, and halakhic conversions. Historical definitions of who is a Jew date back to the codification of the oral tradition into the Babylonian Talmud. Interpretations of sections of the Tanakh, such as Deuteronomy 7:1–5, by learned Jewish sages, are used as a warning against intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews because "[the non-Jewish husband] will cause your child to turn away from Me and they will worship the gods of others." Leviticus 24:10 says that the son in a marriage between a Hebrew woman and an Egyptian man is "of the community of Israel." This is complemented by Ezra 10:2–3, where Israelites returning from Babylon vow to put aside their gentile wives and their children.^[26]^[27] Since the Haskalah, these halakhic interpretations of Jewish identity have been challenged.^[28]

At times, conversion has accounted for a substantial part of Jewish population growth. In the first century of the Christian era, for example, the population more than doubled, from four to 8–10 million within the confines of the Roman Empire, in good part as a result of a wave of conversion.^[29]

Ethnic divisions [link]

Main article: Jewish ethnic divisions

Ashkenazi Jews of late 19th century Eastern Europe portrayed in Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur (1878), by Maurycy Gottlieb

Within the world's Jewish population there are distinct ethnic divisions, most of which are primarily the result of geographic branching from an originating Israelite population, and subsequent independent evolutions. An array of Jewish communities were established by Jewish settlers in various places around the Old World, often at great distances from one another resulting in effective and often long-term isolation from each other. During the millennia of the Jewish diaspora the communities would develop under the influence of their local environments; political, cultural, natural, and populational. Today, manifestation of these differences among the Jews can be observed in Jewish cultural expressions of each community, including Jewish linguistic diversity, culinary preferences, liturgical practices, religious interpretations, as well as degrees and sources of genetic admixture.^[30]

Jews are often identified as belonging to one of two major groups: the Ashkenazim, or "Germanics" (Ashkenaz meaning "Germany" in Medieval Hebrew, denoting their Central European base), and the Sephardim, or "Hispanics" (Sefarad meaning "Spain/Hispania" or "Iberia" in Hebrew, denoting their Spanish, and Portuguese, base). The Mizrahim, or "Easterners" (Mizrach being "East" in Hebrew), that is, the diverse collection of Middle Eastern and North African Jews, constitute a third major group, although they are sometimes termed Sephardi for liturgical reasons.^[31]

Smaller groups include, but are not restricted to, Indian Jews such as the Bene Israel, Bnei Menashe, Cochin Jews, and Bene Ephraim; the Romaniotes of Greece; the Italian Jews ("Italkim" or "Bené Roma"); the Teimanim from Yemen and Oman; various African Jews, including most numerously the Beta Israel of Ethiopia; and Chinese Jews, most notably the Kaifeng Jews, as well as various other distinct but now almost extinct communities.^[32]

The divisions between all these groups are approximate and their boundaries are not always clear. The Mizrahim for example, are a heterogeneous collection of North African, Central Asian, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern Jewish communities that are often as unrelated to each other as they are to any of the earlier mentioned Jewish groups. In modern usage, however, the Mizrahim are sometimes termed Sephardi due to similar styles of liturgy, despite independent development from Sephardim proper. Thus, among Mizrahim there are Egyptian Jews, Iraqi Jews, Lebanese Jews, Kurdish Jews, Libyan Jews, Syrian Jews, Bukharian Jews, Mountain Jews, Georgian Jews, Iranian Jews and various others. The Teimanim from Yemen and Oman are sometimes included, although their style of liturgy is unique and they differ in respect to the admixture found among them to that found in Mizrahim. In addition, there is a differentiation made between Sephardi migrants who established themselves in the Middle East and North Africa after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s and the pre-existing Jewish communities in those regions.^[32]

Despite this diversity, Ashkenazi Jews represent the bulk of modern Jewry, with at least 70% of Jews worldwide (and up to 90% prior to World War II and the Holocaust). As a result of their emigration from Europe, Ashkenazim also represent the overwhelming majority of Jews in the New World continents, in countries such as the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and Brazil. In France, emigration of Jews from North Africa has led them to outnumber the Ashkenazim .^[33] Only in Israel is the Jewish population representative of all groups, a melting pot independent of each group's proportion within the overall world Jewish population.^[34]

Languages [link]

Main article: Jewish languages

Hebrew is the liturgical language of Judaism (termed l'shon ha-kodesh, "the holy tongue"), the language in which the Hebrew scriptures (Tanakh) were composed, and the daily speech of the Jewish people for centuries. By the 5th century BCE, Aramaic, a closely related tongue, joined Hebrew as the spoken language in Judea.^[35] By the third century BCE, Jews of the diaspora were speaking Greek.^[36]

For centuries, Jews worldwide have spoken the local or dominant languages of the regions they migrated to, often developing distinctive dialectal forms or branches that became independent languages. Yiddish is the Judæo-German language developed by Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to Central Europe. Ladino is the Judæo-Spanish language developed by Sephardic Jews who migrated to the Iberian peninsula. Due to many factors, including the impact of the Holocaust on European Jewry, the Jewish exodus from Arab lands, and widespread emigration from other Jewish communities around the world, ancient and distinct Jewish languages of several communities, including Gruzinic, Judæo-Arabic, Judæo-Berber, Krymchak, Judæo-Malayalam and many others, have largely fallen out of use.^[37]

For over sixteen centuries Hebrew was used almost exclusively as a liturgical language, and as the language in which most books had been written on Judaism, with a few speaking only Hebrew on the Sabbath.^[38] Hebrew was revived as a spoken language by Eliezer ben Yehuda, who arrived in Palestine in 1881. It had not been used as a mother tongue since Tannaic times.^[35] Modern Hebrew is now one of the two official languages of the State of Israel along with Arabic.^[39]

The three most commonly spoken languages among Jews today are Hebrew, English and Russian. Some Romance languages, such as French and Spanish, are also widely used.^[37] Yiddish has been spoken by more Jews in history than any other language,^[40] but it is far less used today, after the Holocaust and the adoption of Hebrew by the Zionist movement, then Israel.

Genetic studies [link]

Main article: Genetic studies on Jews

Genetic studies indicate various lineages found in modern Jewish populations; however, most of these populations share a lineage in common, traceable to an ancient population that underwent geographic branching and subsequent independent evolutions.^[41] While DNA tests have demonstrated inter-marriage in all of the various Jewish ethnic divisions over the last 3,000 years, it was substantially less than in other populations.^[42] The findings lend support to traditional Jewish accounts accrediting their founding to exiled Israelite populations, and counters theories that many or most of the world's Jewish populations were founded entirely by local populations that adopted the Jewish religion, devoid of any actual Israelite genetic input.^[42]

DNA analysis further determined that modern Jews of the priesthood tribe—"Kohanim"—share an ancestor dating back about 3,000 years.^[43] This result is consistent for all Jewish populations around the world.^[43] The researchers estimated that the most recent common ancestor of modern Kohanim lived between 1000 BCE (roughly the time of the Biblical Exodus) and 586 BCE, when the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple.^[44] They found similar results analyzing DNA from Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.^[44] The scientists estimated the date of the original priest based on genetic mutations, which indicated that the priest lived roughly 106 generations ago, between 2,650 and 3,180 years ago depending whether one counts a generation as 25 or 30 years.^[44] These Jews belong to the haplotypes J1e and J2a. However, more recent research has shown that many ethnic groups in the Middle East and Mediterranean area also share this genetic profile.^[45]

Although individual and groups of converts to Judaism have historically been absorbed into contemporary Jewish populations, it is unlikely that they formed a large percentage of the ancestors of modern Jewish groups, and much less that they represented their genesis as Jewish communities.^[41]^[46]

Biologist Robert Pollack stated in 2003 that one cannot determine the biological "Jewishness" of an individual because "there are no DNA sequences common to all Jews and absent from all non-Jews".^[47] A 2009 study was able to genetically identify individuals with full or partial Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.^[48]

Male lineages: Y chromosomal DNA [link]

A study published by the National Academy of Sciences found that "the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population", and suggested that "most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora".^[41] Researchers expressed surprise at the remarkable genetic uniformity they found among modern Jews, no matter where the diaspora has become dispersed around the world.^[41]

Other Y-chromosome findings show that the world's Jewish communities are closely related to Kurds, Syrians and Palestinians.^[43]^[49] Skorecki and colleague wrote that "the extremely close affinity of Jewish and non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations observed ... supports the hypothesis of a common Middle Eastern origin".^[43] According to another study of the same year, more than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men (inhabitants of Israel and the territories only) whose DNA was studied inherited their Y-chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region within the last few thousand years. The results are consistent with the Biblical account of Jews and Arabs having a common ancestor. About two-thirds of Israeli Arabs and Arabs in the territories and a similar proportion of Israeli Jews are the descendants of at least three common ancestors who lived in the Middle East in the Neolithic period. However, the Palestinian Arab clade includes two Arab modal haplotypes which are found at only very low frequency among Jews, reflecting divergence and/or large scale admixture from non-local populations to the Palestinians.^[50]

A study of haplotypes of the Y-chromosome, published in 2000, addressed the paternal origins of Ashkenazi Jews. Hammer et al.^[41] found that the Y chromosome of some Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews contained mutations that are also common among Middle Eastern peoples, but uncommon in the general European population. This suggested that the male ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews could be traced mostly to the Middle East. The proportion of male genetic admixture in Ashkenazi Jews amounts to less than 0.5% per generation over an estimated 80 generations, with "relatively minor contribution of European Y chromosomes to the Ashkenazim," and a total admixture estimate "very similar to Motulsky's average estimate of 12.5%." This supported the finding that "Diaspora Jews from Europe, Northwest Africa, and the Near East resemble each other more closely than they resemble their non-Jewish neighbors." However, when all haplotypes were included in the analysis, m (the admixture percentage) increased to 23% ± 7%. In addition, of the Jewish populations in this cluster, the Ashkenazim were closest to South European populations, specifically the Greeks.^[41]

In Jewish populations, Haplogroup J1 (defined by the 267 marker) constitutes 30% of the Yemenite Jews^[51] 20.0% of the Ashkenazim results and 12% of the Sephardic results.^[51]^[52]^[53]^[54] However, J1 is most frequent in Yemen (76%),^[55]^[56] Saudi (64%),^[57] Qatar (58%).^[56] J1 is generally frequent amongst Negev Bedouins (62%^[58]). It is also very common among other Arabs such as those of the Levant, i.e. Palestinian (38.4%),^[52] Syria (30%), Lebanon (25%).^[59]^[60] In Europe, higher frequencies have been reported in the central Adriatic regions of Italy: Gargano (17.2%),^[61] Pescara (15%),^[61] in the Mediterranean Paola (11.1%)^[61] and in South Sicilian Ragusa (10.7%).^[62] Fairly high frequencies have also been reported in other nearby Mediterranean areas: Crete (8.3%),^[63] Malta (7.8%), Cyprus (6.2%),^[64] Greece (5.3%).^[63]

Haplogroup J2 which is found in the Sephardic Jews (29%)^[65] and Ashkenazi Jews (23%),^[65] or 19%.^[66] is found mainly in the Fertile Crescent, the Caucasus,^[67] Anatolia, the Balkans, Italy, the Mediterranean littoral, the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, and South Asia.^[65] More specifically, it is found in Iraq,^[68] Syria, Lebanon,^[69] Turkey, Israel, Palestine, Greece, Italy and the eastern coasts of the Iberian Peninsula,^[61] and more frequently in Iraqis 29.7%,^[70] Lebanese 25%,^[71] Palestinians 16.8%,^[65] Syrians 22.5%,^[72] Kurds 28.4%, Saudi Arabia 15.92%,^[73] Jordan 14.3%, Oman 10–15%,^[74] UAE 10.4%, Yemen 9.7%,^[56] in Israel,^[65] in Palestine,^[65] and in Turkey.^[75]

Female lineages: Mitochondrial DNA [link]

Before 2006, geneticists largely attributed the genesis of most of the world's Jewish populations to founding acts by males who migrated from the Middle East and "by the women from each local population whom they took as wives and converted to Judaism", though no genetic relation was found between Jewish and non Jewish female lineages. However, more recent findings of studies of maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA, at least in Ashkenazi Jews, has led to a review of this archetype.^[76] This research has suggested that, in addition to Israelite male, significant female founder ancestry might also derive from the Middle East-with 40% of Ashkenazim descended from four women lived about 1000–1500 years ago in the Middle East.^[76] In addition, Behar (2006) suggested that the rest of Ashkenazi mtDNA is originated from about 150 women, most of those were probably of Middle Eastern origin.^[77] Approximately 32% of people with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry belong to the mtDNA haplogroup K. This high percentage points to a genetic bottleneck occurring some 100 generations ago.^[78]

Research in 2008 found significant founder effects in many non-Asheknazi Jewish populations. In Belmonte, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Bene Israel and Libyan Jewish communities "a single mother was sufficient to explain at least 40% of their present-day mtDNA variation". In addition, "the Cochin and Tunisian Jewish communities show an attenuated pattern with two founding mothers explaining >30% of the variation." In contrast, Bulgarian, Turkish, Moroccan and Ethiopian Jews were heterogeneous with no evidence "for a narrow founder effect or depletion of mtDNA variation attributable to drift". The authors noted that "the first three of these communities were established following the Spanish expulsion and/or received large influxes of individuals from the Iberian Peninsula and high variation presently observed, probably reflects high overall mtDNA diversity among Jews of Spanish descent. Likewise, the mtDNA pool of Ethiopian Jews reflects the rich maternal lineage variety of East Africa." Jewish communities from Iraq, Iran, and Yemen showed a "third and intermediate pattern... consistent with a founding event, but not a narrow one".^[79]

In this and other studies Yemenite Jews differ from other Mizrahim, as well as from Ashkenazim, in the proportion of sub-Saharan African gene types which have entered their gene pools.^[80] African-specific Hg L(xM,N) lineages were found only in Yemenite and Ethiopian Jewish populations.^[79] Among Yemenites, the average stands at 35% lineages within the past 3,000 years.^[80]

Genome-wide association and linkage studies [link]

In genetic epidemiology, a genome-wide association study (GWA study, or GWAS) is an examination of all or most of the genes (the genome) of different individuals of a particular species to see how much the genes vary from individual to individual. These techniques were originally designed for epidemiological uses, to identify genetic associations with observable traits.^[81]

A 2006 study by Seldin, et al. used over five thousand autosomal SNPs to demonstrate European genetic substructure amongst the Ashkenazi. The results showed "a consistent and reproducible distinction between 'northern' and 'southern' European population groups". Most northern, central, and eastern Europeans (Finns, Swedes, English, Irish, Germans, and Ukrainians) showed >90% in the 'northern' population group, while most individual participants with southern European ancestry (Italians, Greeks, Portuguese, Spaniards) showed >85% in the 'southern' group. Both Ashkenazi Jews as well as Sephardic Jews showed >85% membership in the "southern" group. Referring to the Jews clustering with southern Europeans, the authors state the results were "consistent with a later Mediterranean origin of these ethnic groups".^[82]

A 2007 study by Bauchet, et al. found that Ashkenazi Jews were most closely clustered with Arabic North African populations when compared to Global population, and in the European structure analysis, they share similarities only with Greeks and Southern Italians, reflecting their east Mediterranean origins.^[83]^[84]

A 2010 study on Jewish ancestry by Atzmon-Ostrer et al. stated "Two major groups were identified by principal component, phylogenetic, and identity by descent (IBD) analysis: Middle Eastern Jews and European/Syrian Jews. The IBD segment sharing and the proximity of European Jews to each other and to southern European populations suggested similar origins for European Jewry and refuted large-scale genetic contributions of Central and Eastern European and Slavic populations to the formation of Ashkenazi Jewry.", as both groups—the Middle Eastern Jews and European/Syrian Jews shared common ancestors in the Middle East about 2500 years ago. The study examines genetic markers spread across the entire genome and shows that the Jewish groups (Ashkenazi and non Ashkenazi) share large swaths of DNA, indicating close relationships and that each of the Jewish groups in the study (Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek and Ashkenazi) has its own genetic signature but is more closely related to the other Jewish groups than to their non Jewish fellow countrymen.^[85] Atzmon's team found that the SNP markers in genetic segments of 3 million DNA letters or longer were 10 times more likely to be identical among Jews than non-Jews. Results of the analysis also tally with biblical accounts of the fate of the Jews. Using their DNA analysis, the authors traced the ancestors of all Jews to Persia and Babylon, areas that now form part of Iran and Iraq.^[86] The study also found that with respect to non-Jewish European groups, the population most closely related to Ashkenazi Jews are modern-day Italians. The study speculated that the genetic-similarity between Ashkenazi Jews and Italians may be due to inter-marriage and conversions in the time of the Roman Empire. It was also found that any two Ashkenazi Jewish participants in the study shared about as much DNA as fourth or fifth cousins^[87]^[88]

A 2010 study by Bray et al, using SNP microarray techniques and linkage analysis, estimated that 35 to 55 percent of the modern Ashkenazi genome is specifically traceable to Europe, and that European "admixture is considerably higher than previous estimates by studies that used the Y chromosome". The study assumed Druze and Palestinian Arabs populations to represent the reference to world Jewry ancestor genome. With this reference point, the linkage disequilibrium in the Ashkenazi Jewish population was interpreted as "matches signs of interbreeding or 'admixture' between Middle Eastern and European populations". In their press release, Bray stated: "We were surprised to find evidence that Ashkenazi Jews have higher heterozygosity than Europeans, contradicting the widely-held presumption that they have been a largely isolated group". "Thus, the AJ population shows evidence of past founding events; however, admixture and selection have also strongly influenced its current genetic makeup." The authors note that their results will require further investigation.^[89]^[90]

Demographics [link]

Main article: Jewish population

Population centres [link]

Further information: Judaism by country and Jewish population by cities and city areas

Country^[1]	Jews, №	Jews, %
Israel	5,916,200^[91]	75.52%
United States	5,275,000	1.71%
France	483,500	0.77%
Canada	375,000	1.11%
United Kingdom	292,000	0.47%
Russia	205,000	0.15%
Argentina	182,300	0.45%
Germany	119,000	0.15%
Australia	107,500	0.50%
Brazil	95,600	0.05%
Ukraine	71,500	0.16%
South Africa	70,800	0.14%
Hungary	48,600	0.49%
Mexico	39,400	0.04%
Belgium	30,300	0.28%
Netherlands	30,000	0.18%
Italy	28,400	0.05%
Total	13,558,300	0.21%

There are an estimated 13–14 million Jews worldwide.^[1] The table lists countries with significant populations.^[1] Please note that these populations represent low-end estimates of the worldwide Jewish population, accounting for around 0.2% of the world's population.

State of Israel [link]

Main article: Israeli Jews

Israel, the Jewish nation-state, is the only country in which Jews make up a majority of the citizens.^[92] Israel was established as an independent democratic and Jewish state on May 14, 1948.^[93] Of the 120 members in its parliament, the Knesset,^[94] currently, 12 members of the Knesset are Arab citizens of Israel, most representing Arab political parties and one of Israel's Supreme Court judges is a Palestinian Arab.^[95]

Between 1948 and 1958, the Jewish population rose from 800,000 to two million.^[96] Currently, Jews account for 75.8% of the Israeli population, or 5.4 million people.^[97] The early years of the state of Israel were marked by the mass immigration of Holocaust survivors and Jews fleeing Arab lands.^[98] Israel also has a large population of Ethiopian Jews, many of whom were airlifted to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s.^[99] Between 1974 and 1979 nearly 227,258 immigrants arrived in Israel, about half being from the Soviet Union.^[100] This period also saw an increase in immigration to Israel from Western Europe, Latin America, and the United States^[101]

A trickle of immigrants from other communities has also arrived, including Indian Jews and others, as well as some descendants of Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors who had settled in countries such as the United States, Argentina, Australia, Chile, and South Africa. Some Jews have emigrated from Israel elsewhere, due to economic problems or disillusionment with political conditions and the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict. Jewish Israeli emigrants are known as yordim.^[102]

Diaspora (outside Israel)[link]

Main article: Jewish diaspora

The waves of immigration to the United States and elsewhere at the turn of the 19th century, the founding of Zionism and later events, including pogroms in Russia, the massacre of European Jewry during the Holocaust, and the founding of the state of Israel, with the subsequent Jewish exodus from Arab lands, all resulted in substantial shifts in the population centers of world Jewry by the end of the 20th century.^[103]

Public Hanukkah menorah in Nicosia, Cyprus

In this Rosh Hashana greeting card from the early 1900s, Russian Jews, packs in hand, gaze at the American relatives beckoning them to the United States. Over two million Jews fled the pogroms of the Russian Empire to the safety of the US between 1881 and 1924.^[104]

Currently, the largest Jewish community in the world is located in the United States, with 5.3 million to 6.4 million Jews by various estimates. Elsewhere in the Americas, there are also large Jewish populations in Canada, Argentina, and Brazil, and smaller populations in Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and several other countries (see History of the Jews in Latin America).^[97]

Western Europe's largest Jewish community can be found in France, home to 490,000 Jews, the majority of whom are immigrants or refugees from North African Arab countries such as Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (or their descendants).^[105] There are 295,000 Jews in the United Kingdom. In Eastern Europe, there are anywhere from 350,000 to one million Jews living in the former Soviet Union, but exact figures are difficult to establish. The fastest-growing Jewish community in the world, outside Israel, is the one in Germany, especially in Berlin, its capital. Tens of thousands of Jews from the former Eastern Bloc have settled in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall.^[106]

The Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East were home to around 900,000 Jews in 1945. Fueled by anti-Zionism^[107] after the founding of Israel, systematic persecution caused almost all of these Jews to flee to Israel, North America, and Europe in the 1950s (see Jewish exodus from Arab lands). Today, around 8,000 Jews remain in all Arab nations combined.^[108]

Iran is home to around 10,800 Jews, down from a population of 100,000 Jews before the 1979 revolution. After the revolution some of the Iranian Jews emigrated to Israel or Europe but most of them emigrated (with their non-Jewish Iranian compatriots) to the United States (especially Los Angeles, where the principal community is called "Tehrangeles").^[108]^[109]

Outside Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and the rest of Asia, there are significant Jewish populations in Australia and South Africa.^[108]

Demographic changes [link]

Main article: Historical Jewish population comparisons

Assimilation [link]

Main article: Jewish assimilation

Since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, a proportion of Jews have assimilated into the wider non-Jewish society around them, by either choice or force, ceasing to practice Judaism and losing their Jewish identity.^[110] Assimilation took place in all areas, and during all time periods,^[110] with some Jewish communities, for example the Kaifeng Jews of China, disappearing entirely.^[111] The advent of the Jewish Enlightenment of the 18th century (see Haskalah) and the subsequent emancipation of the Jewish populations of Europe and America in the 19th century, accelerated the situation, encouraging Jews to increasingly participate in, and become part of, secular society. The result has been a growing trend of assimilation, as Jews marry non-Jewish spouses and stop participating in the Jewish community.^[112]

Rates of interreligious marriage vary widely: In the United States, they are just under 50%,^[113] in the United Kingdom, around 53%, in France, around 30%,^[114] and in Australia and Mexico, as low as 10%.^[115]^[116] In the United States, only about a third of children from intermarriages affiliate themselves with Jewish religious practice.^[117] The result is that most countries in the Diaspora have steady or slightly declining religiously Jewish populations as Jews continue to assimilate into the countries in which they live.

War and persecution [link]

Main article: Persecution of Jews

Further information: Antisemitism, Islam and antisemitism, History of antisemitism, and New antisemitism

Jews (identifiable by the distinctive hats that they were required to wear) being killed by Christian knights. French Bible illustration from 1255.

World War I poster shows a soldier cutting the bonds from a Jewish man, who says, "You have cut my bonds and set me free - now let me help you set others free!"

The Jewish people and Judaism have experienced various persecutions throughout Jewish history. During late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages the Roman Empire (in its later phases known as the Byzantine Empire) repeatedly repressed the Jewish population, first by ejecting them from their homelands during the pagan Roman era and later by officially establishing them as second-class citizens during the Christian Roman era.^[118]^[119]

According to James Carroll, "Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if other factors had not intervened, there would be 200 million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13 million."^[120]

Later in medieval Western Europe, further persecutions of Jews in the name of Christianity occurred, notably during the Crusades—when Jews all over Germany were massacred—and a series of expulsions from England, Germany, France, and, in the largest expulsion of all, Spain and Portugal after the Reconquista (the Catholic Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula), where both unbaptized Sephardic Jews and the ruling Muslim Moors were expelled.^[121]^[122]

In the Papal States, which existed until 1870, Jews were required to live only in specified neighborhoods called ghettos.^[123] In the 19th and (before the end of World War II) 20th centuries, the Roman Catholic Church adhered to a distinction between "good antisemitism" and "bad antisemitism". The "bad" kind promoted hatred of Jews because of their descent. This was considered un-Christian because the Christian message was intended for all of humanity regardless of ethnicity; anyone could become a Christian. The "good" kind criticized alleged Jewish conspiracies to control newspapers, banks, and other institutions, to care only about accumulation of wealth, etc.^[124]

Islam and Judaism have a complex relationship. Traditionally Jews and Christians living in Muslim lands, known as dhimmis, were allowed to practice their religions and to administer their internal affairs, but subject to certain conditions.^[125] They had to pay the jizya (a per capita tax imposed on free adult non-Muslim males) to the Islamic state.^[125] Dhimmis had an inferior status under Islamic rule. They had several social and legal disabilities such as prohibitions against bearing arms or giving testimony in courts in cases involving Muslims.^[126] Many of the disabilities were highly symbolic. The one described by Bernard Lewis as "most degrading"^[127] was the requirement of distinctive clothing, not found in the Qur'an or hadith but invented in early medieval Baghdad; its enforcement was highly erratic.^[127] On the other hand, Jews rarely faced martyrdom or exile, or forced compulsion to change their religion, and they were mostly free in their choice of residence and profession.^[128]

Notable exceptions include the massacre of Jews and/or forcible conversion of some Jews by the rulers of the Almohad dynasty in Al-Andalus in the 12th century,^[129] as well as in Islamic Persia,^[130] and the forced confinement of Moroccan Jews to walled quarters known as mellahs beginning from the 15th century and especially in the early 19th century.^[131] In modern times, it has become commonplace for standard antisemitic themes to be conflated with anti-Zionist publications and pronouncements of Islamic movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas, in the pronouncements of various agencies of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and even in the newspapers and other publications of Turkish Refah Partisi."^[132]

Jews in Minsk, 1941. Before World War II some 40% of the population was Jewish. By the time the Red Army retook the city on 3 July 1944, there were only a few Jewish survivors.

Throughout history, many rulers, empires and nations have oppressed their Jewish populations or sought to eliminate them entirely. Methods employed ranged from expulsion to outright genocide; within nations, often the threat of these extreme methods was sufficient to silence dissent. The history of antisemitism includes the First Crusade which resulted in the massacre of Jews;^[121] the Spanish Inquisition (led by Torquemada) and the Portuguese Inquisition, with their persecution and autos-da-fé against the New Christians and Marrano Jews;^[133] the Bohdan Chmielnicki Cossack massacres in Ukraine;^[134] the Pogroms backed by the Russian Tsars;^[135] as well as expulsions from Spain, Portugal, England, France, Germany, and other countries in which the Jews had settled.^[122] According to a recent study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics 19.8% of the modern Iberian population has Sephardic Jewish ancestry,^[136] indicating that the number of conversos may have been much higher than originally thought.^[137]^[138]

The persecution reached a peak in Nazi Germany's Final Solution, which led to the Holocaust and the slaughter of approximately 6 million Jews.^[139] The Holocaust — the state-led systematic persecution and genocide of European Jews (and certain communities of North African Jews in European controlled North Africa) and other minority groups of Europe during World War II by Germany and its collaborators remains the most notable modern day persecution of Jews.^[140] The persecution and genocide were accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II.^[141] Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease.^[142] Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings.^[143] Jews and Roma were crammed into ghettos before being transported hundreds of miles by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers.^[144] Virtually every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal nation."^[145]

Migrations [link]

Etching of the expulsion of the Jews from Frankfurt on August 23, 1614. The text says: "1380 persons old and young were counted at the exit of the gate"

Jews fleeing pogroms, 1882

Throughout Jewish history, Jews have repeatedly been directly or indirectly expelled from both their original homeland and the areas in which they have resided. This experience as refugees has shaped Jewish identity and religious practice in many ways, and is thus a major element of Jewish history.^[146] The incomplete list of major and other noteworthy migrations that follows includes numerous instances of expulsion or departure under duress:

The patriarch Abraham was a migrant to the land of Canaan from Ur of the Chaldees^[147] after an attempt on his life by King Nimrod.^[148]
The Children of Israel experienced the Exodus (meaning "departure" or "exit" in Greek) from ancient Egypt, as recorded in the Book of Exodus.^[149]
The Kingdom of Israel was sent into permanent exile by Assyria, initially to the Upper Mesopotamian provinces of the Assyrian Empire,^[150] from whence they scattered all over the world (or at least to unknown locations).^[151]
The Kingdom of Judah was exiled by Babylonia,^[152] then returned to Judea by Cyrus the Great of the Persian Achaemenid Empire,^[153] and then many were exiled again by the Roman Empire.^[154]
The 2,000 year dispersion of the Jewish diaspora beginning under the Roman Empire, as Jews were spread throughout the Roman world and, driven from land to land, and settled wherever they could live freely enough to practice their religion. Over the course of the diaspora the center of Jewish life moved from Babylonia^[155] to the Iberian Peninsula^[156] to Poland^[157] to the United States^[158] and, as a result of Zionism, back to Israel.^[159]
Many expulsions during the Middle Ages and Enlightenment in Europe, including: 1290, 16,000 Jews were expelled from England, see the (Statute of Jewry); in 1396, 100,000 from France; in 1421 thousands were expelled from Austria. Many of these Jews settled in Eastern Europe, especially Poland.^[160]
Following the Spanish Inquisition in 1492, the Spanish population of around 200,000 Sephardic Jews were expelled by the Spanish crown and Catholic church, followed by expulsions in 1493 in Sicily (37,000 Jews) and Portugal in 1496. The expelled Jews fled mainly to the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, and North Africa, others migrating to Southern Europe and the Middle East.^[161]
During the 19th century, France's policies of equal citizenship regardless of religion led to the immigration of Jews (especially from Eastern and Central Europe).^[162]
The arrival of millions of Jews in the New World, including immigration of over two million Eastern European Jews to the United States from 1880–1925, see History of the Jews in the United States and History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union.^[163]
The Pogroms in Eastern Europe,^[135] the rise of modern antisemitism,^[164] the Holocaust,^[165] and the rise of Arab nationalism^[166] all served to fuel the movements and migrations of huge segments of Jewry from land to land and continent to continent, until they arrived back in large numbers at their original historical homeland in Israel.^[159]
The Islamic Revolution of Iran caused many Iranian Jews to flee Iran. Most found refuge in the US (particularly Los Angeles, CA) and Israel. Smaller communities of Persian Jews exist in Canada and Western Europe.^[167]
When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of the Jews in the affected territory (who had been refuseniks) were suddenly allowed to leave. This produced a wave of migration to Israel in the early 1990s.^[102]

Growth [link]

Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn

Israel is the only country with a consistently growing Jewish population due to natural population increase, though the Jewish populations of other countries in Europe and North America have recently increased due to immigration. In the Diaspora, in almost every country the Jewish population in general is either declining or steady, but Orthodox and Haredi Jewish communities, whose members often shun birth control for religious reasons, have experienced rapid population growth.^[168]

Orthodox and Conservative Judaism discourage proselytism to non-Jews, but many Jewish groups have tried to reach out to the assimilated Jewish communities of the Diaspora in order for them to reconnect to their Jewish roots. Additionally, while in principle Reform Judaism favors seeking new members for the faith, this position has not translated into active proselytism, instead taking the form of an effort to reach out to non-Jewish spouses of intermarried couples.^[169]

There is also a trend of Orthodox movements pursuing secular Jews in order to give them a stronger Jewish identity so there is less chance of intermarriage. As a result of the efforts by these and other Jewish groups over the past 25 years, there has been a trend of secular Jews becoming more religiously observant, known as the Baal Teshuva movement, though the demographic implications of the trend are unknown.^[170] Additionally, there is also a growing movement of Jews by Choice by gentiles who make the decision to head in the direction of becoming Jews.^[171]

Leadership [link]

Main article: Jewish leadership

There is no single governing body for the Jewish community, nor a single authority with responsibility for religious doctrine.^[172] Instead, a variety of secular and religious institutions at the local, national, and international levels lead various parts of the Jewish community on a variety of issues.^[173]

Notable individuals [link]

Main article: Lists of Jews

Jews have made contributions in a broad range of human endeavors, including the sciences, arts, politics, and business.^[174]^[175] Although Jews comprise only 0.2% of the world's population, over 20%^[175]^[176] of Nobel Prize laureates have been Jewish, with multiple winners in each field.

Notes [link]

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k ^l ^m ⁿ ^o ^p ^q ^r ^s ^t ^u ^v ^w ^x DellaPergola, Sergio (November 2, 2010). "World Jewish Population, 2010". In Dashefsky, Arnold; Sheskin, Ira (PDF). Current Jewish Population Reports. Storrs, Connecticut: North American Jewish Data Bank. http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Reports/World_Jewish_Population_2010.pdf. Retrieved March 3, 2012.
^ Brandeis, Louis (April 25, 1915). "The Jewish Problem: How To Solve It". University of Louisville School of Law. http://www.law.louisville.edu/library/collections/brandeis/node/234. Retrieved April 2, 2012. "Jews are a distinctive nationality of which every Jew, whatever his country, his station or shade of belief, is necessarily a member"
^ Palmer, Edward Henry (October 14, 2002) [First published 1874]. A History of the Jewish Nation: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day. Gorgias Press. ISBN 978-1-931956-69-7. OCLC 51578088. http://archive.org/details/historyofjewishn00palm. Retrieved April 2, 2012. Lay summary.
^ Einstein, Albert (June 21, 1921). "How I Became a Zionist". Einstein Papers Project. Princeton University Press. http://press.princeton.edu/einstein/materials/jewish_nationality.pdf. Retrieved April 5, 2012. "The Jewish nation is a living fact"
^ A 1970 amendment to Israel's Law of Return defines "Jew" as "a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion." "Law of Return". http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Immigration/Text_of_Law_of_Return.html.
^ Ancient Canaan and Israel: an introduction. Golden, Jonathan M. (2009). Oxford University Press US.
^ Johnson (1987), p. 82.
^ Pfeffer, Anshel (September 12, 2007). "Jewish Agency: 13.2 million Jews worldwide on eve of Rosh Hashanah, 5768". Haaretz. Archived from the original on March 19, 2009. http://web.archive.org/web/20090319024731/http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/903585.html. Retrieved January 24, 2009.
^ "Jew", Oxford English Dictionary.
^ Grintz, Yehoshua M. (2007). "Jew". In Fred Skolnik. Encyclopaedia Judaica. 11 (2d ed.). Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. p. 253. ISBN 0-02-865928-7.
^ Falk, Avner (1996). A Psychoanalytic History of the Jews. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. p. 131. ISBN 0-8386-3660-8.
^ "Yiddish". Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.). Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster. 2004. p. 1453. ISBN 0-87779-809-5.
^ "Jew". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/Jew. Retrieved April 2, 2012.
^ Jared Diamond (1993). "Who are the Jews?". http://ftp.beitberl.ac.il/~bbsite/misc/ezer_anglit/klali/05_123.pdf. Retrieved November 8, 2010. Natural History 102:11 (November 1993): 12-19.
^ Neusner (1991) p. 64
^ Patai, Raphael (1996) [1977]. The Jewish Mind. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. p. 7. ISBN 0-8143-2651-X.
^ Johnson, Lonnie R. (1996). Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 145. ISBN 0-19-510071-9.
^ ^a ^b Sharot (1997), pp. 29–30.
^ Sharot (1997), pp. 42–3.
^ Sharot (1997), p. 42.
^ Fishman, Sylvia Barack (2000). Jewish Life and American Culture. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. p. 38. ISBN 0-7914-4546-1.
^ Kimmerling, Baruch (1996). The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. p. 169. ISBN 0-88706-849-9.
^ Lowenstein, Steven M. (2000). The Jewish Cultural Tapestry: International Jewish Folk Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 228. ISBN 0-19-513425-7.
^ Weiner, Rebecca (2007). "Who is a Jew?". Jewish Virtual Library. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/whojew1.html. Retrieved 2007-10-06.
^ Fowler, Jeaneane D. (1997). World Religions: An Introduction for Students. Sussex Academic Press. p. 7. ISBN 1-898723-48-6.
^ "What is the origin of Matrilineal Descent?". Shamash.org. September 4, 2003. http://www.shamash.org/lists/scj-faq/HTML/faq/10-11.html. Retrieved January 9, 2009.
^ "What is the source of the law that a child is Jewish only if its mother is Jewish?". Torah.org. http://www.torah.org/qanda/seequanda.php?id=318. Retrieved January 9, 2009.
^ Dosick (2007), pp. 56–7.
^ Bauer, Yehuda. "Beyond the fourth wave: contemporary anti-Semitism and radical Islam". http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0411/is_1-2_55/ai_n26961277/. Retrieved April 2, 2012.
^ Dosick (2007), p. 60.
^ Dosick (2007), p. 59.
^ ^a ^b Schmelz, Usiel Oscar; Sergio DellaPergola (2007). "Demography". In Fred Skolnik. Encyclopaedia Judaica. 5 (2d ed.). Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. p. 571. ISBN 0-02-865928-7.
^ Schmelz, Usiel Oscar; Sergio DellaPergola (2007). "Demography". In Fred Skolnik. Encyclopaedia Judaica. 5 (2d ed.). Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. pp. 571–2. ISBN 0-02-865928-7.
^ Dosick (2007), p. 61.
^ ^a ^b Grintz, Jehoshua M. (March 1960). "Hebrew as the Spoken and Written Language in the Last Days of the Second Temple". Journal of Biblical Literature (The Society of Biblical Literature) 79 (1): 32–47. DOI:10.2307/3264497. JSTOR 3264497.
^ Feldman (2006), p. 54.
^ ^a ^b "Links". Beth Hatefutsoth. Archived from the original on March 26, 2009. http://web.archive.org/web/20090326102214/http://www.bh.org.il/links/jewishlangs.asp. Retrieved April 2, 2012.
^ Parfitt, T. V. (1972). "The Use Of Hebrew In Palestine 1800–1822". Journal of Semitic Studies 17 (2): 237–52. DOI:10.1093/jss/17.2.237. http://jss.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/2/237.full.pdf+html.
^ "Israel and the United States: Friends, Partners, Allies". Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C.. http://www.mfa.gov.il/NR/rdonlyres/EDC6CB3D-73EE-43BD-9CDC-ED4EFF8A4008/0/usisrael_pub.pdf. Retrieved April 2, 2012.
^ Hebrew, Aramaic and the rise of Yiddish. D. Katz. (1985) Readings in the sociology of Jewish languages'
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Hammer, M. F.; Redd, A. J.; Wood, E. T.; Bonner, M. R.; Jarjanazi, H.; Karafet, T.; Santachiara-Benerecetti, S.; Oppenheim, A. et al. (June 2000). "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes". PNAS 97 (12): 6769–74. Bibcode 2000PNAS...97.6769H. DOI:10.1073/pnas.100115997. PMC 18733. PMID 10801975. http://www.pnas.org/content/97/12/6769.full.pdf+html.
^ ^a ^b Wade, Nicholas (May 9, 2000). "Y Chromosome Bears Witness to Story of the Jewish Diaspora". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D02E0D71338F93AA35756C0A9669C8B63. Retrieved May 6, 2010.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Skorecki K, Selig S, Blazer S, Bradman R, Bradman N, Waburton PJ, Ismajlowicz M, Hammer MF (January 1997). "Y chromosomes of Jewish priests". Nature 385 (6611): 32. Bibcode 1997Natur.385...32S. DOI:10.1038/385032a0. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 8985243.
^ ^a ^b ^c "Priestly Gene Shared By Widely Dispersed Jews". American Society for Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. July 14 1998. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/07/980714071409.htm.
^ Ekins, JE; E.N. Tinah, N.M. Myres, K.H. Ritchie, U.A. Perego, J.B. Ekins, L.A.D. Hutchison, L. Layton, M.L. Lunt, S.S. Masek, A.A. Nelson, M.E. Nelson, K.L. Pennington, J.L. Peterson, T. Tolley, S.R. Woodward (2005). "An Updated World-Wide Characterization of the Cohen Modal Haplotype" (PDF). ASHG meeting October 2005. http://www.smgf.org/resources/papers/ASHG2005_Jayne.pdf.
^ Nebel, A; Filon, D; Brinkmann, B; Majumder, Pp; Faerman, M; Oppenheim, A (November 2001). "The Y chromosome pool of Jews as part of the genetic landscape of the Middle East". Am J Hum Genet 69 (5): 1095–112. DOI:10.1086/324070. ISSN 0002-9297. PMC 1274378. PMID 11573163. //www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1274378.
^ Pollack, Robert (March 7, 2003). "The Fallacy of Biological Judaism". http://www.forward.com/articles/9406/. "...there are no DNA sequences common to all Jews and absent from all non-Jews. There is nothing in the human genome that makes or diagnoses a person as a Jew."
^ Need AC, Kasperaviciute D, Cirulli ET, Goldstein DB (2009). "A genome-wide genetic signature of Jewish ancestry perfectly separates individuals with and without full Jewish ancestry in a large random sample of European Americans". Genome Biology 10 (1): R7. DOI:10.1186/gb-2009-10-1-r7. PMC 2687795. PMID 19161619. //www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2687795.
^ Appelbaum, Diana Muir; Paul S. Appelbaum (12 February 2008). "Genetics and the Jewish identity". Jerusalem Post. http://www.jpost.com/Features/Article.aspx?id=91746. Retrieved April 3, 2012.
^ Nebel, Almut; Filon, Dvora; Weiss, Deborah A.; Weale, Michael; Faerman, Marina; Oppenheim, Ariella; Thomas, Mark G. (2000). "High-resolution Y chromosome haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs reveal geographic substructure and substantial overlap with haplotypes of Jews". Human Genetics 107 (6): 630–41. DOI:10.1007/s004390000426. PMID 11153918.
^ ^a ^b Shen, et al. 2004
^ ^a ^b Semino, et al. 2004
^ Questions Answered through DNA Genealogy Testing for Ancestry by Familybuilder
^ Behar, et al. 2004
^ Alshamaly, et al. 2009: 84/104 (81%), Malouf, et al. 2008: 28/40 = 70% J1-M267, 6/40 = 15% J2a4b-M67
^ ^a ^b ^c Cadenas AM, Zhivotovsky LA, Cavalli-Sforza LL, Underhill PA, Herrera RJ (March 2008). "Y-chromosome diversity characterizes the Gulf of Oman". Eur. J. Hum. Genet. 16 (3): 374–86. DOI:10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201934. PMID 17928816.
Yemen 45/62 = 72.6% J1-M267
Qatar 42/72 = 58.3% J1-M267
^ Alshamaly, et al. 2009: 68/106 (64%)
^ 21/31 Nebel, et al. 2001
^ combined (Wells, et al. 2001 19%) & (Zalloua, et al. 2008 20%) Wells, et al. 2001: 32.0% E-M96, 30.0% J1-M267, 30.0% J2-M172, 2.0% L-M20, 6.0% R1-M173.
^ Zalloua PA, Xue Y, Khalife J, Makhoul N, Debiane L, Platt DE, Royyuru AK, Herrera RJ, Hernanz DF, Blue-Smith J, Wells RS, Comas D, Bertranpetit J, Tyler-Smith C (April 2008). "Y-chromosomal diversity in Lebanon is structured by recent historical events". Am. J. Hum. Genet. 82 (4): 873–82. DOI:10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.01.020. PMC 2427286. PMID 18374297. //www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2427286.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Di Giacomo, F.; Luca, F.; Anagnou, N.; Ciavarella, G.; Corbo, R. M.; Cresta, M.; Cucci, F.; Di Stasi, L. et al. (September 2003). "Clinal patterns of human Y chromosomal diversity in continental Italy and Greece are dominated by drift and founder effects". Mol Phylogenet Evol 28 (3): 387–95. DOI:10.1016/S1055-7903(03)00016-2. PMID 12927125. http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf/italy.pdf.
^ Di Gaetano C, Cerutti N, Crobu F, Robino C, Inturri S, Gino S, Guarrera S, Underhill PA, King RJ, Romano V, Cali F, Gasparini M, Matullo G, Salerno A, Torre C, Piazza A (January 2009). "Differential Greek and northern African migrations to Sicily are supported by genetic evidence from the Y chromosome". Eur. J. Hum. Genet. 17 (1): 91–9. DOI:10.1038/ejhg.2008.120. PMC 2985948. PMID 18685561. http://volgagermanbrit.us/documents/ejhg2008120a.pdf.
^ ^a ^b King RJ, Ozcan SS, Carter T, et al. (March 2008). "Differential Y-chromosome Anatolian influences on the Greek and Cretan Neolithic". Ann. Hum. Genet. 72 (Pt 2): 205–14. DOI:10.1111/j.1469-1809.2007.00414.x. PMID 18269686.
Crete 16 out of 193
Greece 9 out of 171
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^ N. Al-Zahery et al., "Y-chromosome and mtDNA polymorphisms in Iraq, a crossroad of the early human dispersal and of post-Neolithic migrations," Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution (2003)
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^ "''Tracing Jewish roots'' by Tina Hesman Saey, ''ScienceNews'', June 3, 2010". Sciencenews.org. 2010-07-03. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/59938/title/Tracing_Jewish_roots. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
^ "''How religion made Jews genetically distinct'' by Andy Coghlan, ''Newscientist'', June 4, 2010". Newscientist.com. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19008-how-religion-made-jews-genetically-distinct.html. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
^ Genes set Jews apart, study finds, by Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2010
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^ Analysis of Ashkenazi Jewish genomes reveals diversity, history, Press release, Emory University, 26-Aug-2010
^ Signatures of founder effects, admixture, and selection in the Ashkenazi Jewish population, Steven M. Braya, Jennifer G. Mullea, Anne F. Dodda, Ann E. Pulverb, Stephen Woodingc, and Stephen T. Warrena, PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1004381107
^ "Israel closes decade with population of 7.5 million". Haaretz. 30 December 2009. http://www.haaretz.com/news/israel-closes-decade-with-population-of-7-5-million-1.1083. Retrieved 20 March 2012.
^ "'Iran must attack Israel by 2014'". The Jerusalem Post. February 9, 2012. http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=257112. Retrieved April 3, 2012.
^ "Israel". The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency. 2007-06-19. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/is.html. Retrieved 2007-07-20.
^ "The Electoral System in Israel". The Knesset. http://www.knesset.gov.il/description/eng/eng_mimshal_beh.htm. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
^ "Israel". Freedom in the World. Freedom House. 2009. http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2009/israel.
^ "Population, by Religion and Population Group". Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 2006. http://www1.cbs.gov.il/reader/shnaton/templ_shnaton_e.html?num_tab=st02_01&CYear=2006. Retrieved 2007-08-07.
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^ Dekmejian 1975, p. 247. "And most [Oriental-Sephardic Jews] came... because of Arab persecution resulting from the very attempt to establish a Jewish state in Palestine."
^ "airlifted tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews". http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/ejhist.html#operation1/. Retrieved July 7, 2005.
^ Alexeyeva, Lyudmila (1983). "История инакомыслия в СССР [History of Dissident Movement in the USSR]" (in Russian). Vilnius. http://www.memo.ru/history/diss/books/alexeewa/.
^ Goldstein (1995) p. 24
^ ^a ^b Dosick (2007), p. 340.
^ Gartner (2001), p. 213.
^ Gurock, Jeffrey S. (1998). East European Jews in America, 1880–1920: Immigration and Adaptation. New York: Routledge. p. 54. ISBN 0-415-91924-X.
^ Gartner (2001), pp. 410–410.
^ Waxman, Chaim I. (2007). "Annual Assessment 2007" (PDF). Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (Jewish Agency for Israel). pp. 40–2. http://jppi.org.il/uploads/Annual%20Assessment%202007.pdf. Retrieved 2008-07-03.
^ "The Ingathering of the Exiles". Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/History/Modern%20History/Israel%20at%2050/The%20Ingathering%20of%20the%20Exiles.
^ ^a ^b ^c "Jewish Virtual Library". Jewish Virtual Library. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/jewpop.html#region. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
^ Littman (1979), p. 5.
^ ^a ^b Johnson (1987), p. 171.
^ Edinger, Bernard (December 15, 2005). "Chinese Jews: Reverence for Ancestors". Shavei Israel. http://www.shavei.org/communities/kaifeng_jews/articles-kaifeng_jews/chinese-jews-reverence-for-ancestors/. Retrieved April 2, 2012.
^ Elazar (2003), p. 434.
^ "NJPS: Defining and Calculating Intermarriage". http://www.jewishfederations.org/page.aspx?id=46252. Retrieved April 2, 2012.
^ Cohen, Erik H.. "Les Juifs de France: La Lente Progression des Mariages Mixtes" (in French). http://www.akadem.org/photos/contextuels/1027_357_Rapport_Erik_Cohen.pdf. Retrieved March 25, 2009.
^ "Australia". World Jewish Congress. http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/communities/show/id/2. Retrieved April 2, 2012.
^ "The Virtual Jewish History Tour – Mexico". http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Mexico.html. Retrieved July 7, 2005.
^ Waxman, Chaim I. (2007). "Annual Assessment 2007" (PDF). Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (Jewish Agency for Israel). p. 61. http://jppi.org.il/uploads/Annual%20Assessment%202007.pdf. Retrieved 2008-07-03.
^ Goldenberg (2007), pp. 131, 135–6.
^ Johnson (1987), pp. 164–5.
^ Carroll, James. Constantine's Sword (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) ISBN 0-395-77927-8 p.26
^ ^a ^b Johnson (1987), pp. 207–8.
^ ^a ^b Johnson (1987), pp. 213, 229–31.
^ Johnson (1987), pp. 243–4.
^ "A Catholic Timeline of Events Relating to Jews, Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust, From the 3rd century to the Beginning of the Third Millennium". Sullivan-county.com. http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/mine/timeline.htm. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
^ ^a ^b Lewis (1984), pp. 10, 20
^ Lewis (1987), p. 9, 27
^ ^a ^b Lewis (1999), p.131
^ Lewis (1999), p.131; (1984), pp.8,62
^ Lewis (1984), p. 52; Stillman (1979), p.77
^ Lewis (1984), pp. 17–8, 94–5; Stillman (1979), p. 27
^ Lewis (1984), p. 28.
^ Lewis, Bernard (June 1998). "Muslim Anti-Semitism". Middle East Quarterly. Middle East Forum. http://www.meforum.org/396/muslim-anti-semitism.
^ Johnson (1987), pp. 226–9.
^ Johnson (1987), pp. 259–60.
^ ^a ^b Johnson (1987), pp. 364–5.
^ "Study: 20 Percent of Spanish, Portuguese Have Jewish Ancestry". Fox News Channel. December 8, 2008. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,463564,00.html.
^ "DNA study shows 20 percent of Iberian population has Jewish ancestry". The New York Times. December 4, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/world/europe/04iht-gene.4.18411385.html.
^ "The Genetic Legacy of Religious Diversity and Intolerance: Paternal Lineages of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula". Cell.com. http://www.cell.com/AJHG/fulltext/S0002-9297(08)00592-2. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
^ Johnson (1987), p. 512.
^ Donald L Niewyk, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, p.45: "The Holocaust is commonly defined as the murder of more than 5,000,000 Jews by the Germans in World War II." However, the Holocaust usually includes all of the different victims who were systematically murdered.
^ Johnson (1987), pp. 484–8.
^ Johnson (1987), pp. 490–2.
^ "Ukrainian mass Jewish grave found". BBC News. 2007-06-05. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6724481.stm. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
^ Johnson (1987), pp. 493–8.
^ Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know," United States Holocaust Museum, 2006, p. 103.
^ de Lange (2002), pp. 41–3.
^ Johnson (1987), p. 10.
^ Hirsch, Emil G.; Seligsohn, Max (1901–1906). "NIMROD". Jewish Encyclopedia. http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11548-nimrod.
^ Johnson (1987), p. 30.
^ Malamat, Abraham (2007). "Exile, Assyrian". In Fred Skolnik. Encyclopaedia Judaica (2d ed.). Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. ISBN 0-02-865928-7. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0006_0_06182.html.
^ Johnson (1987), pp. 70–1.
^ Johnson (1987), pp. 78–9.
^ Johnson (1987), pp. 85–6.
^ Johnson (1987), p. 147.
^ Johnson (1987), p. 163.
^ Johnson (1987), p. 177.
^ Johnson (1987), p. 231.
^ Johnson (1987), p. 460.
^ ^a ^b Gartner (2001), p. 431.
^ Gartner (2001), pp. 11–2.
^ Johnson (1987), pp. 229–31.
^ Johnson (1987), p. 306.
^ Johnson (1987), p. 370.
^ Gartner (2001), pp. 213–5.
^ Gartner (2001), pp. 357–70.
^ Johnson (1987), pp. 529–30.
^ Netzer, Amnon (2007). "Iran". In Fred Skolnik. Encyclopaedia Judaica. 10 (2d ed.). Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. pp. 13. ISBN 0-02-865928-7.
^ Gartner (2001), pp. 400–1.
^ Kaplan (2003), p. 301.
^ Danzger (2003), pp. 495–6.
^ de Lange (2002), p. 220.
^ Eisenstadt, S.N. (2004). Explorations in Jewish Historical Experience: The Civilizational Dimension. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. p. 75. ISBN 90-04-13693-2.
^ Lewis, Hal M. (2006). From Sanctuary to Boardroom: A Jewish Approach to Leadership. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 1. ISBN 0-7425-5229-2.
^ Schwartz, Richard H. (2001). Judaism and Global Survival. New York: Lantern Books. p. 153. ISBN 1-930051-87-5.
^ ^a ^b Brooks, David (January 11, 2010). "The Tel Aviv Cluster". The New York Times: p. A23. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/opinion/12brooks.html. Retrieved January 13, 2010. "Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates. Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction."
^
- Shalev, Baruch (2005). 100 Years of Nobel Prizes. p. 57. "A striking fact... is the high number of Laureates of the Jewish faith—over 20% of the total Nobel Prizes (138); including: 17% in Chemistry, 26% in Medicine and Physics, 40% in Economics and 11% in Peace and Literature each. These numbers are especially startling in light of the fact that only some 14 million people (0.2% of the world's population) are Jewish."
- Dobbs, Stephen Mark (October 12, 2001). "As the Nobel Prize marks centennial, Jews constitute 1/5 of laureates". j.. http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/16556/as-the-nobel-prize-marks-centennial-jews-constitute-1-5-of-laureates/. Retrieved April 3, 2012. "Throughout the 20th century, Jews, more so than any other minority, ethnic or cultural group, have been recipients of the Nobel Prize -- perhaps the most distinguished award for human endeavor in the six fields for which it is given. Remarkably, Jews constitute almost one-fifth of all Nobel laureates. This, in a world in which Jews number just a fraction of 1 percent of the population."
- "Jewish Nobel Prize Winners". http://www.jewishbiography.com/biographies/list-of-jews/jewish-nobel-prize-winners/index.html. Retrieved 25 November 2011.
- Ted Falcon, David Blatner (2001). "28". Judaism for dummies. John Wiley & Sons. "Similarly, because Jews make up less than a quarter of one percent of the world's population, it's surprising that over 20 percent of Nobel prizes have been awarded to Jews or people of Jewish descent."
- Lawrence E. Harrison (2008). The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save It. Oxford University Press. p. 102. "That achievement is symbolized by the fact that 15 to 20 percent of Nobel Prizes have been won by Jews, who represent two tenths of one percent of the world's population."
- Jonathan B. Krasner, Jonathan D. Sarna (2006). The History of the Jewish People: Ancient Israel to 1880's America. Behrman House, Inc.. p. 1. "These accomplishments account for 20 percent of the Nobel Prizes awarded since 1901. What a feat for a people who make up only .2 percent of the world's population!"

References [link]

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Cowling, Geoffrey (2005). Introduction to World Religions. Singapore: First Fortress Press. ISBN 0-8006-3714-3.
Danzger, M. Herbert (2003) [2000]. "The "Return" to Traditional Judaism at the End of the Twentieth Century: Cross-Cultural Comparisons". In Neusner, Jacob; Avery-Peck, Alan J.. The Blackwell Companion to Judaism. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 1-57718-058-5.
Dekmejian, R. Hrair (1975). Patterns of Political Leadership: Egypt, Israel, Lebanon. State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-87395-291-X.
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Feldman, Louis H. (2006). Judaism and Hellenism Reconsidered. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. ISBN 90-04-14906-6.
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Goldenberg, Robert (2007). The Origins of Judaism: From Canaan to the Rise of Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-84453-3.
Goldstein, Joseph (1995). Jewish History in Modern Times. Sussex Academic Press. ISBN 1-898723-06-0.
Johnson, Paul (1987). A History of the Jews. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-091533-1.
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Ruderman, David B. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton University Press; 2010) 326 pages. Examines print culture, religion, and other realms in a history emphasizing the links among early modern Jewish communities from Venice and Kraków to Amsterdam and Smyrna.
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Andrew James Viterbi
Born	(1935-03-09)March 9, 1935 Bergamo, Italy
Nationality	Italian, American
Education	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS, MS) University of Southern California (PhD)
Spouse	Erna Finci
Children	3
Work
Engineering discipline	Electrical
Institution memberships	University of Southern California Board of Trustees The Scripps Research Institute Board of Trustees, Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute
Employer(s)	Professor: UC Los Angeles UC San Diego Founder/Co-founder: Linkabit Corporation Qualcomm Inc. The Viterbi Group
Significant projects	Viterbi algorithm
Significant advance	Code Division Multiple Access standard for cell phone networks
Significant awards	National Medal of Science IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal IEEE Medal of Honor

Andrew James Viterbi (born Andrea James Viterbi; March 9, 1935) is an Italian-American electrical engineer and businessman who co-founded Qualcomm Inc.

Viterbi was born in Bergamo, Italy to Jewish parents and emigrated with them in 1939 to the United States as a refugee. His original name was Andrea, but when he was naturalized in the US, his parents changed it to Andrew, since Andrea is a female name in many English-speaking countries.

1 Education
2 Further career
3 References
4 External links
5 Further reading

Education [link]

Viterbi attended the Boston Latin School, and then entered MIT in 1952, studying electrical engineering. He received both BS and MS in Electrical Engineering in 1957 from MIT.

He worked at Raytheon and later at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where he started working on telemetry for guided missiles, also helping to develop the phase-locked loop. Simultaneously, he was carrying out a PhD study at the University of Southern California, where he graduated in 1963 in digital communications.^[1]

Further career [link]

After receiving his Ph.D., he applied successfully for an academic position at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Viterbi was later a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and UCSD. In 1967 he invented the Viterbi algorithm, which he used for decoding convolutionally encoded data. It is still used widely in cellular phones for error correcting codes, as well as for speech recognition, DNA analysis, and many other applications of Hidden Markov models. On advice of a lawyer, Viterbi did not patent the algorithm.^[2] Viterbi also helped to develop the CDMA standard for cell phone networks.

Viterbi was the cofounder of Linkabit Corporation, with Irwin Jacobs in 1968, a small military contractor. He was also the co-founder of Qualcomm Inc. with Dr. Jacobs in 1985. As of 2003^[update], he is the president of the venture capital company The Viterbi Group.

Viterbi School of Engineering, west wall

In 1998 he was one of the few receiving a Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society. Viterbi earned it for "the invention of the Viterbi algorithm".^[3] In 2002, Viterbi dedicated the Andrew Viterbi '52 Computer Center at his alma mater, Boston Latin School. On March 2, 2004, the University of Southern California School of Engineering was renamed the Viterbi School of Engineering in his honor, following his $52 million donation to the school.^[4] He is a member of the USC Board of Trustees.^[5]

He is also on the Board of Trustees at The Scripps Research Institute.

He is also founding member of ISSNAF (The Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation).

In 2005, he was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering.

Viterbi and Irwin M. Jacobs received the 2007 IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award, for "fundamental contributions, innovation, and leadership that enabled the growth of wireless telecommunications".^[6]

In September 2008, he was awarded the National Medal of Science for developing "the 'Viterbi algorithm', and for his contributions to Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) wireless technology that transformed the theory and practice of digital communications".

In 2010, he received the IEEE Medal of Honor and in the same year he also received the IIC Lifetime Achievement Award by the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles.

Viterbi is married to Erna Finci, with whom he has three children.

References [link]

^ http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/2010-medal-of-honor-winner-andrew-j-viterbi
^ Viterbi, Andrew (1999-10-29). Andrew Viterbi, Electrical Engineer, an oral history. Interview with David Morton. IEEE Global History Network. San Diego, California, United States. http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Andrew_Viterbi#Linkabit_and_M.2FA-COM.3B_development_and_consumers. Retrieved 2009-11-10.
^ "Golden Jubilee Awards for Technological Innovation". IEEE Information Theory Society. http://www.itsoc.org/honors/golden-jubilee-awards-for-technological-innovation. Retrieved 2011-07-14.
^ "Engineer/Entrepreneur and wife make $52 million naming gift to USC" (Press release). University of Southern California. http://viterbi.usc.edu/about/viterbi/viterbi_press_release.htm. Retrieved 2007-06-05.
^ Board of Trustees, University of Southern California, Retrieveded 2008-04-13.
^ "IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award Recipients". IEEE. http://www.ieee.org/documents/maxwell_rl.pdf. Retrieved 2011-10-04.

External links [link]

IEEE History Center Interview
The Quiet Genius, Trudy E. Bell (PDF)
Noteworthy alumni page at MIT
Video: Andrew Viterbi on Fascist Italy, US Jews and Primo Levi

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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Viterbi

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Primo Levi
200px
Born	(1919-07-31)July 31, 1919 Turin, Italy
Died	April 11, 1987(1987-04-11) (aged 67) Turin
Cause of death	A fall from the interior landing of his third-story apartment in Turin
Nationality	Italian
Other names	Damiano Malabaila (used for some of his fictional works)
Ethnicity	Jewish-Italian
Education	Degree in chemistry
Alma mater	University of Turin
Occupation	Chemist, writer
Years active	Active as a writer 1947–1986
Known for	If This is a Man, an account of his year in Auschwitz
Spouse	Lucia Morpurgo
Parents	Cesare Levi (father), Ester, known as Rina (mother)
Relatives	Anna Maria Levi (sister)

Primo Michele Levi (pronounced [ˈpriːmo ˈlɛːvi]; July 31, 1919 – April 11, 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975) which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written.^[1]

1 Biography
2 Popular culture references
3 Bibliography
4 Adaptations
5 Notes and references
6 External links

Biography [link]

Early life [link]

Levi was born in Turin at Corso Re Umberto 75 into a liberal Jewish family. His father Cesare worked for the manufacturing firm Ganz and spent much of his time working abroad in Hungary, where Ganz was based. Cesare was an avid reader and autodidact. Levi’s mother Ester, known to everyone as Rina, was well educated, having attended the Istituto Maria Letizia. She too was an avid reader, played the piano and spoke fluent French.^[2] The marriage between Rina and Cesare was arranged by Rina’s father.^[2] On their wedding day, Rina’s father, Cesare Luzzati, gave Rina the apartment at Corso Re Umberto where Primo Levi was to live for almost his entire life.

In 1921 Anna Maria, Levi's sister was born; he was to remain close to her all of his life. In 1925 he entered the Felice Rignon primary school in Turin. A thin and delicate child, he was shy and thought of himself as being ugly, but he excelled academically. His school record includes long periods of absence during which time he was tutored at home at first by Emilia Glauda and then by Marisa Zini, daughter of philosopher Zino Zini.^[3] Summers were spent with his mother in the Waldensian valleys south-west of Turin where Rina rented a farmhouse. His father remained in Turin partly because of his dislike of the rural life, but also because of his infidelities.^[4]

In September 1930 he entered the Massimo d'Azeglio Royal Gymnasium a year ahead of normal entrance requirements.^[5] In class he was the youngest, the shortest and the cleverest as well as being the only Jew. For these reasons, he was bullied.^[6] In August 1932, following two years at the Talmud Torah school in Turin, he sang in the local synagogue for his Bar Mitzvah. In 1933, as was expected of all young Italian schoolboys, he joined the Avanguardisti movement for young Fascists. He avoided rifle drill by joining the ski division, and then spent every Saturday during the season on the slopes above Turin.^[7] As a young boy Levi was plagued by illness, particularly chest infections, but he was keen to participate in physical activity. In his teens Levi and a few of his friends would sneak into a disused sports stadium and conduct athletic competitions.

In July 1934 at the age of 14, he sat the exams for the Massimo d'Azeglio liceo classico, a Lyceum (sixth form) specialising in the classics and was admitted that autumn. The school was noted for its well-known anti-Fascist teachers, amongst them the philosopher Norberto Bobbio, and for a few months Cesare Pavese, also an anti-Fascist and later to become one of Italy's best-known novelists.^[8] Levi continued to be bullied during his time at the Lyceum although he was now in a class with six other Jews.^[9] Upon reading Concerning the Nature of Things by Sir William Bragg, Levi decided that he wanted to be a chemist.^[10] Levi matriculated from the school in 1937 despite being accused of ignoring a call-up to the Italian Royal Navy the week before his exams were due to begin. As a result of this incident, and possibly some antisemitic bias in the marking, Levi had to retake his Italian paper. At the end of the summer he passed his exams and in October he enrolled at the University of Turin, to study chemistry. The registered intake of eighty hopefuls spent three months taking lectures in preparation for their colloquio (oral examination) when the eighty would be reduced to twenty. The following February Levi graduated onto the full-time chemistry course.

Initially, Fascist Italy was not ideologically antisemitic; in fact, Jews held many positions of high authority under Benito Mussolini.^[11] The Fascist regime, following the Lateran Treaty with the Catholic Church, had subscribed a similar agreement with the Italian Jewish Communities in the 1930s.^{[citation needed]} But the growing political kinship with Nazi Germany brought, in July 1938, the promulgation of the so-called Manifesto of the Race, which claimed that there existed a pure Italian race and that Italians were Aryans. In September 1938 the Fascist government introduced racial laws which, amongst other things, prohibited Jewish citizens from attending state schools. Jewish students who had begun their course of study were permitted to continue them, but new Jewish students were barred from entering university. It was therefore fortuitous that Levi had matriculated a year early, as he would not otherwise have been permitted to take a degree.

In 1939 Levi began his love affair with hiking in the mountains.^[12] His friend Sandro Delmastro taught him how to hike and they spent many week-ends in the mountains above Turin. Physical exertion, the risk and the battle with the elements here supplied him with an outlet for all the frustrations in his life.^{[citation needed]} In June 1940 Italy declared war against Britain and France, and the first air raids on Turin began two days later. Levi’s studies continued during the bombardments, and an additional strain on the family was imposed when his father became bedridden with bowel cancer.

Chemistry [link]

However, because of the new antisemitic laws and the increasing intensity of prevalent Fascism, Levi had difficulty finding a supervisor for his graduation thesis which was on the subject of Walden inversion, a study of the asymmetry of the carbon atom. Eventually taken on by Dr. Nicolò Dallaporta he graduated in the summer of 1941 with full marks and merit, having submitted additional theses on x-rays and electrostatic energy. His degree certificate bore the remark, "of Jewish race". The racial laws prevented Levi from finding a suitable permanent position after he had graduated.

In December 1941 Levi was approached and clandestinely offered a job at an asbestos mine at San Vittore. The project he was given was to extract nickel from the mine spoil, a challenge he accepted with pleasure. It was not lost on Levi that should he be successful he would be aiding the German war effort, which was suffering nickel shortages in the production of armaments.^[13] The job required Levi to work under a false name with false papers. In March 1942 while he was working at the mine Levi’s father died.

In June 1942, due to the deteriorating situation in Turin, Levi left the mine and went to work in Milan. He had been recruited through a fellow student at Turin University who was now working for the Swiss firm of A Wander Ltd on a project to extract an anti-diabetic from vegetable matter. He could take the job because the racial laws did not apply to Swiss companies. It soon became clear that the project had no chance of succeeding, but it was in no one's interest to say so.^[14]

In September 1943, after the new Italian government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio signed an armistice with the Allies, the former leader Mussolini was rescued from imprisonment by the Germans and installed as head of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy. Levi returned home to Turin to find his mother and sister having taken refuge in their holiday home La Saccarello in the hills outside Turin. They all then embarked to Saint-Vincent in the Aosta Valley where they could be hidden. Being pursued by the authorities they moved up the hillside to Amay in the Colle di Joux. Amay was on the route to Switzerland that was followed by Allied prisoners of war and refugees trying to escape the Germans.

The Italian resistance movement became increasingly active in the German-occupied zone. Levi and a number of comrades took to the foothills of the Alps and in October joined the liberal Giustizia e Libertà partisan movement. Completely untrained for such a venture, he and his companions were quickly arrested by the Fascist militia.

When told he would be shot as an Italian partisan, he confessed to being Jewish and was then sent to an internment camp for Jews at Fossoli near Modena. Primo Levi's writings held at Yad Vashem indicate that as long as Fossoli was under Italian, rather than Nazi German control, he was not harmed. "We were given, on a regular basis, a food ration destined for the soldiers", Levi's testimony stated, "and at the end of January 1944, we were taken to Fossoli on a passenger train. Our conditions in the camp were quite good. There was no talk of executions and the atmosphere was quite calm. We were allowed to keep the money we had brought with us and to receive money from the outside. We worked in the kitchen in turn and performed other services in the camp. We even prepared a dining room, a rather sparse one, I must admit."

Auschwitz [link]

IG Farben factory in Monowitz (near Auschwitz) 1941
50°02′10″N 19°16′32″E / 50.036094°N 19.275534°ECoordinates: 50°02′10″N 19°16′32″E / 50.036094°N 19.275534°E

When Fossoli fell into the hands of the Germans, the Jews were rounded up for deportation. On 21 February 1944, the inmates of the camp were transported in twelve cramped cattle trucks to Monowitz, one of the three main camps in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex (his record number was 174,517). Levi spent eleven months there before the camp was liberated by the Red Army on January 18, 1945. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camps alive. The average life expectancy of a new entrant was three months.

Levi knew some German from reading German publications on chemistry; he quickly oriented himself to life in the camp without attracting the attention of the privileged inmates; he used bread to pay a more experienced Italian prisoner for German lessons and orientation in Auschwitz; and he received a smuggled soup ration each day from Lorenzo Perrone, an Italian civilian bricklayer, working as a forced labourer. His professional qualifications were also useful: in mid-November 1944 he was able to secure a position as an assistant in IG Farben's Buna Werke laboratory that was intended to produce synthetic rubber, thereby avoiding hard labour in freezing outdoor temperatures. Shortly before the camp was liberated by the Red Army, he fell ill with scarlet fever and was placed in the camp's sanatorium (camp hospital). On January 18, 1945, the SS hurriedly evacuated the camp as the Red Army approached, forcing all but the gravely ill on a long death march that led to the death of the vast majority of the remaining prisoners. Levi's illness spared him this fate.

Although liberated on 27 January 1945, Levi did not reach Turin until 19 October 1945. After spending some time in a Soviet camp for former concentration camp inmates, as a result of the Armistice between Italy and Allied armed forces he embarked on an arduous journey home in the company of former pre-1946 Italian prisoners of war from the Royal Italian Army in Russia. His long railway journey home to Turin took him on a circuitous route from Poland, through Bielorussia, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany.

Writing career [link]

1946-1960 [link]

Levi was almost unrecognisable on his return to Turin. Malnutrition edema had bloated his face. Sporting a scrawny beard and wearing an old Red Army uniform he arrived back at Corso Re Umberto. The next few months gave him an opportunity to recover physically, re-establish contact with surviving friends and family and to start looking for work. However, Levi was understandably suffering from psychological trauma. Having been unable to find work in Turin he started to look for work in Milan. On his train journeys he started to tell people he met stories about his time at Auschwitz. At a Jewish New Year party in 1946 he met Lucia Morpurgo who offered to teach him to dance. Levi fell in love with Lucia. At about this time he started writing poetry about his experiences in the Lager.

On 21 January 1946 he started work at DUCO, a Du Pont Company paint factory, outside Turin. As the train service out to the factory was so limited Levi stayed in the factory dormitory during the week, which gave him the opportunity to write undisturbed. It was here that he started to write down the first draft of If This Is a Man.^[15] Every day he would scribble down notes on train tickets and scraps of paper as memories came to him. At the end of February he had ten pages detailing the last ten days between the German evacuation and the arrival of the Red Army. For the next ten months the book took shape in his dormitory as he typed up his recollections each night.

On 22 December 1946, the manuscript was complete. Lucia, who now reciprocated Levi’s love, helped him to edit it, to make the narrative flow more naturally.^[16] In January 1947 Levi was taking the finished manuscript around publishers, but the wounds he was describing were still too fresh and he had no literary experience to give him a reputation as an author.

Eventually Levi found a publisher, Franco Antonicelli, through a friend of his sister’s.^[17] Antonicelli was an amateur publisher, but as an active anti-Fascist he was supportive of the idea of the book. At the end of June 1947, Levi suddenly left DUCO and teamed up with an old friend Alberto Salmoni to run a chemical consultancy from the top floor of Salmoni’s parents’ house. Many of Levi’s experiences of this time found their way into his later writing. They made most of their money from making and supplying stannous chloride for mirror makers,^[18] delivering the unstable chemical by bicycle across the city. The attempts to make lipsticks from reptile excreta and a coloured enamel to coat teeth were turned into short stories. Accidents in their laboratory filled the Salmoni house with unpleasant smells and corrosive gases.

In September 1947, Levi married Lucia and a month later on the 11th October If This Is a Man was published with a print run of 2000 copies. In April 1948, with Lucia pregnant with their first child, Levi decided that the life of an independent chemist was too precarious and agreed to go and work for Federico Accatti in the family paint business which traded under the name SIVA. In October 1948 Levi’s first child, his daughter Lisa, was born.

A major trauma for Levi during this period was the decline and death of Lorenzo Perrone. Lorenzo was an Italian, civilian worker in the Lager, who for six months in the camp, gave the remainder of his ration and a piece of bread to Levi without asking anything in return. ^[19] Levi juxtaposes Lorenzo against everyone else in the camp, prisoners and guards alike, as someone who has managed to preserve his humanity. After the war Lorenzo could not cope with the memories of what he saw and descended into alcoholism. Levi made several trips to rescue his old friend from the streets, but in 1952 Lorenzo died.^[17]

In 1950, having demonstrated his ample chemical talents to Accatti, he was made Technical Director at SIVA.^[20] As SIVA’s principal chemist and trouble shooter Levi travelled abroad. He made several trips to Germany and carefully engineered his contacts with senior German businessmen and scientists. Wearing short sleeved shirts he made sure they saw his prison camp number tattooed on his arm, and he engaged them on the depravity of the Nazis and the lack of redemption sought by most Germans, many of whom had been involved in the exploitation of slave labour during the war.

He was also involved in organisations pledged to remembering the horror of the camps. In 1954 he visited Buchenwald to mark the ninth anniversary of the camps liberation from the Nazis. There were many such anniversaries over the years and Levi dutifully attended them to tell and retell his memories. In July 1957, his son Renzo was born, almost certainly named after his saviour Lorenzo Perrone.

Despite a positive review by Italo Calvino in L'Unità, only 1,500 copies of If This Is a Man were sold. Levi had to wait till 1958 before Einaudi published it, in a revised form.

In 1958 Stuart Woolf, in close collaboration with Levi, translated If This Is a Man into English and it was published in the UK in 1959 by Orion Press. Also in 1959 Heinz Riedt, also under close supervision by Levi,^[21] translated it into German. As one of Levi’s primary reasons for writing the book was to get the German people to realise what had been done in their name, and to accept at least partial responsibility, this translation was perhaps the most significant.

1961-1974 [link]

Levi began writing The Truce early in 1961 and it was published in 1963, almost 16 years after his first book, and the same year it won the first annual Premio Campiello literary award. It is often published in one volume with If This Is a Man, as it covers his long return from Auschwitz. Levi's reputation was growing. He regularly contributed articles to La Stampa, the Turin newspaper. He wished to be known also as a writer about subjects other than his deportation.

Also in 1963 came his first major bout of depression. At the time he had two young children, a responsible job at a factory where accidents could and did have terrible consequences, he travelled, became a public figure, and yet the memory of what happened less than twenty years earlier still burned in his mind. Today we recognise the link between stress and depression, but then it was not the case. Also the drugs available to him, several of which he was prescribed over the years, had variable efficacy and side effects.

In 1964 he collaborated on a radio play based upon If This Is a Man with the state broadcaster RAI, and in 1966 with a theatre production.

He published two volumes of science fiction short stories under the pen name of Damiano Malabaila which explored ethical and philosophical questions as well as imagining the impact upon society of inventions which many would consider beneficial, but which, he saw, would have serious implications. Many of the stories from the two books Storie naturali (Natural Histories) published in 1966 and Vizio di forma (Structural Defect) published in 1971 were later released in English as The Sixth Day and other Tales.

In 1974 he arranged to go into semi-retirement from SIVA in order to have more time to write, as well as escaping the burden of responsibility for managing the paint plant.^[22]

1975-1987 [link]

In 1975 a collection of Levi’s poetry was published under the title L’osteria di Brema (The Bremen Beer Hall), published in English as Shema: Collected Poems.

He also wrote two other highly praised memoirs, Lilit e altri racconti (Moments of Reprieve) was published in 1978 and Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table) in 1975. Moments of Reprieve deals with characters he observed during imprisonment. The Periodic Table is a collection of short pieces, mostly episodes from his life but also two short stories that he wrote before his time in Auschwitz, all related in some way to one of the chemical elements. At London's Royal Institution on 19 October 2006 it was voted onto the shortlist for the best science book ever written.^[23]

Levi retired as a part-time consultant at the SIVA paint factory in 1977 to devote himself full-time to writing. Like all of his books, 1978's La chiave a stella (published in the US in 1986 as The Monkey Wrench and in the UK in 1987 as The Wrench) is difficult to categorize. In some reviews it is described as a collection of stories about work and workers told by a narrator, Faussone, resembling Levi himself. Others have called it a novel, as common characters appear in the stories. Based upon a FIAT-run town in Russia called Togliattigrad, it portrays the engineer as a hero on whom others depend. The underlying philosophy is that pride in one's work is necessary for fulfillment. The Piedmontese engineer Faussone travels the world as an expert in erecting cranes and bridges. This book aroused criticism from left-wing critics because he did not describe the working conditions on the assembly lines at FIAT.^[24] However, it brought Levi a wider audience in Italy and The Wrench won the Strega Prize in 1979. Most of the stories involve the solution of industrial problems by the use of troubleshooting skills and clearly many stories come from the author's personal experience.

In 1984 his only novel, If Not Now, When? -- or his second novel, if we count "The Monkey Wrench" -- was published. It traces the fortunes of a group of Jewish partisans behind German lines during World War II as they seek to survive and continue their fight against the occupier. With the ultimate goal of reaching Palestine to take part in the construction of a Jewish national home, the partisan band reaches Poland and then German territory before the surviving members are officially received as displaced persons in territory held by the Western allies. Finally, they succeed in reaching Italy, on their way to Palestine. The novel won both the Premio Campiello and the Premio Viareggio. The book had its origin in Levi’s train journey home, narrated in The Truce. At one point in the journey a band of Zionists hitch their own wagon to the refugee train. Levi was impressed by their strength, resolve, organisation, and sense of purpose.

Levi became a major literary figure in Italy. The Truce became a standard text in Italian schools. His books were translated into many other languages. In 1985, he flew to America for a speaking tour of twenty days. The trip, on which he was accompanied by Lucia, was very draining for him. In the Soviet Union his early works were not acceptable to censors because they portrayed Soviet soldiers as slovenly and disorderly rather than heroic. In Israel, a country formed partly by Jewish refugees who escaped horrors more or less the same as Levi experienced, Levi's works were not translated until after his death.

Höss immediately before being hanged.

In March 1985 he wrote the introduction to the re-publication of the autobiography^[25] of Rudolf Höß who was commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp from 1940 to 1943. In it he writes "It's filled with evil . . . and reading it is agony".

Also in 1985 a volume of essays, previously published in La Stampa, was published under the title L’altrui mestiere (Other People’s Trades). Levi used to write these stories and hoard them away, releasing them to La Stampa at the rate of almost one a week. The essays ranged from book reviews and ponderings about strange things in nature to fictional short stories.

In 1986 his book I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved), was published. In it he tried to analyse why people behaved the way they did at Auschwitz, and why some survived whilst others perished. In his typical style he makes no judgments but presents the evidence and asks the questions. For example, one essay examines what he calls "The Grey Area", those Jews who did the Germans' dirty work for them and kept the rest of the prisoners in line. What made a concert violinist behave as a callous taskmaster?

Also in 1986 another collection of short stories, previously published in La Stampa, was assembled and published as Racconti e saggi (some of which were published in the English volume The Mirror Maker).

At the time of his death, in April 1987, he was working on another selection of essays called The Double Bond which took the form of letters to "La Signorina".^[26] These essays are very personal in nature. Approximately five or six chapters of this manuscript exist. Carole Angier, in her biography of Levi, describes how she tracked some of these essays down, but that others were being kept away from public view by Levi’s close friends, to whom he distributed them, and they may have been destroyed.

In March 2007 Harper's Magazine published an English translation of Levi's story "Knall", about a fictitious weapon that is fatal at close range but harmless more than a meter away. It originally appeared in his 1971 book Vizio di forma, but was published in English for the first time by Harper's.

A Tranquil Star, a collection of seventeen stories translated into English by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli [4] [5] was published in April 2007.

Views on Nazism and antisemitism [link]

What drove Levi to write If This Is a Man was a desire to bear witness to the horrors of the Nazis' attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. He read many accounts of witnesses and survivors and attended meetings of survivors, becoming in the end a symbolic figure for anti-fascists in Italy.

Levi visited over 130 schools to talk about his experiences in Auschwitz. He was shocked by negationist attitudes that tried to rewrite the history of the camps as less horrific, what is now referred to as Holocaust denial. His view was that the Nazi death camps and the attempted annihilation of the Jews was a horror unique in history because the aim was the complete destruction of a race by one that saw itself as superior; it was highly organized and mechanized; it entailed the degradation of Jews even to the point of using their ashes as materials for paths.^[27]

With the publication in the late 1960s and 1970s of the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the world became aware that the Soviet regime used camps (gulags) to repress dissidents who might be imprisoned for as much as twenty years. There were similarities with the Lager; the hard physical work and poor rations. Levi rejected, however, the idea that The Gulag Archipelago and the system of the Nazi Lager (German: Vernichtungslager); see Nazi concentration camps) were equivalent. The death rate in the gulags was estimated at 30% at worst, he wrote, while in the Lager he estimated it was 90–98%.^[28] The aim of the Lager was to eliminate the Jewish race. No one was excluded. No-one could renounce Judaism; the Nazis treated Jews as a racial group rather than a religious one. Many children were taken to the camps, and almost all died.^[29]The purpose of the Nazi camps was not the same as that of the Soviet gulags, Levi wrote in an appendix of If This Is a Man, though it is a "lugubrious comparison between two models of hell".^[30]

Levi himself, along with most of Turin's Jewish intellectuals, was not religiously observant. It was the Fascist race laws and the Nazi camps that made him feel Jewish. Levi writes in clear almost scientific style about his experiences in Auschwitz, showing no lasting hatred of the Germans. This has led some commentators to suggest that he had forgiven them, though Levi denied this.

Death [link]

Buchenwald, 1945. Elie Wiesel is on the second row from the bottom, seventh from the left.

Levi died on 11 April 1987, when he fell from the interior landing of his third-story apartment in Turin to the ground floor below. Elie Wiesel said at the time that "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years earlier".

The coroner interpreted Levi's death as suicide, and three of his biographers (Angier, Thomson and Anissimov) agree with this interpretation. In his later life Levi indicated he was suffering from depression: factors may have included responsibility for his elderly mother and mother-in-law, with whom he was living in the same apartment, and the traumatic effects of memory.^[31]

However, Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta has argued that the conventional assumption of Levi's death by 'suicide' is not well justified by either factual or inferred evidence.^[32] Levi left no suicide note, and no other clear indication that he had thoughts of taking his own life. In Gambetta's view, documents and testimony indicate immediate and ongoing plans at the time of his death. Rita Levi Montalcini, a close friend of Levi, commented that "If Levi wanted to kill himself he, a chemical engineer by profession, would have known better ways than jumping into a narrow stairwell with the risk of remaining paralyzed." Also, Gambetta has pointed out that Levi had complained to his physician of dizziness in the days before his death, and concludes (from a visit to the apartment complex) that it is more plausible to assume Levi lost his balance and fell accidentally to his death.^[33]

Popular culture references [link]

A quotation from Levi appears on the sleeve of popular Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers second album, Gold Against the Soul. The quote's origin is from Levi's poem "Song of Those Who Died In Vain". In an interview for the TV program Raw Soup in 1993, Manics guitarist Richey Edwards said that "Primo Levi was a beautiful person."^[34]
"Primo on the Parapet" is a song by Peter Hammill dedicated to Primo Levi. The refrain says:

Here's a toast to Primo,

let's learn not to forget.

Here's a toast to Primo,

forgive but don't forget.^{[citation needed]}^[35]

David Blaine has Primo Levi's concentration camp number, 174517, from Auschwitz tattooed on his left forearm.^[36]
In the Academy Award winning 2003 film by Denys Arcand, Les Invasions Barbares (The Barbarian Invasions), the main character expresses outrage at the apparent apathy of the Roman Catholic Church during World War II toward the Holocaust: "Que votre Pie XII soit resté assis sur son cul dans son Vatican doré pendant qu'on amenait Primo Lévi à Auschwitz [...] C'est abject, c'est immonde!!" which translates to: "Pius XII sitting on his ass in his gilded Vatican, while Primo Levi was taken to Auschwitz... It's despicable! Hideous!". In another scene the same character wishes that he had written The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Levi's The Periodic Table. Later in the same film, a French edition of If This Is A Man (Si c'est un homme) is prominently shown on the same character's bookshelf).^{[citation needed]}
Christopher Hitchens' book The Portable Atheist, a collection of extracts of atheist texts, is dedicated to the memory of Levi "who had the moral fortitude to refuse false consolation even while enduring the 'selection' process in Auschwitz". The dedication then quotes Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, asserting, "I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day."^[37]
Part of Levi's short story "Bear Meat" is quoted by Emile Hirsch playing Christopher McCandless in the 2007 film Into the Wild. ^[38]
The German metalcore band Heaven Shall Burn named their song "If This Is a Man" after the autobiography of the same name.
Inspired by Primo Levi, Primo Levi Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to studying the history and culture of Italian Jewry, opened its doors in NYC in 2003. [6]
French singer Mylène Farmer's 1999 single, "Souviens-toi du jour", refers to If This Is a Man in the lyrics.
A street in the Talpiot neighbourhood of Jerusalem, Israel is named after him.
Leonard Cohen's 1964 book of poetry Flowers for Hitler, which itself deals with the Holocaust, uses quotation from Levi's Auschwitz memoirs as its motto.
The film Crimes and Misdemeanors contains a character named Prof. Louis Levi, a philosopher who is based on Primo Levi.

Bibliography [link]

Title	Year	Type	English language translations
Se questo è un uomo	1947 and 1958	Memoir	If This Is a Man (US: Survival in Auschwitz)
La tregua	1963	Memoir	The Truce (US: The Reawakening)
Storie naturali (as Damiano Malabaila)	1966	Short stories	The Sixth Day and Other Tales
Vizio di forma	1971	Short stories	Mainly in The Sixth Day and Other Tales. Some stories are in A Tranquil Star
Il sistema periodico	1975	Short stories	The Periodic Table
L'osteria di Brema	1975	Poems	In Collected Poems (Primo Levi)
Lilìt e altri racconti	1978	Short stories	Part 1: Moments of Reprieve. Some stories from Parts 2 and 3 are in A Tranquil Star
La chiave a stella	1978	Novel	The Wrench (US: The Monkey's Wrench)
La ricerca delle radici	1981	Personal anthology	The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology
Se non ora, quando?	1984	Novel	If Not Now, When?
Ad ora incerta	1984	Poems	In Collected Poems (Primo Levi)
L'altrui mestiere	1985	Essays	Other People's Trades
I sommersi e i salvati	1986	Essays	The Drowned and the Saved
Racconti e Saggi	1986	Essays	The Mirror Maker
Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987	1997	Various (posthumous)	Conversations with Primo Levi and The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961-1987
	2005	Essays (posthumous)	The Black Hole of Auschwitz
	2006	Factual (posthumous)	Auschwitz Report
	2007	Short stories (posthumous)	A Tranquil Star
	2011	Short stories	The Magic Paint

Adaptations [link]

If This Is a Man was adapted by Antony Sher into a one-man stage production Primo in 2004. A version of this production was broadcast on BBC4 in the UK on September 20, 2007. [7]
The 1997 Film La Tregua (The Truce), starring John Turturro, recounts Levi's long journey home after his liberation from Auschwitz.
The 2001 film The Grey Zone is based upon the second chapter from The Drowned and the Saved.^[39]

Notes and references [link]

^ Randerson, James (2006) "Levi's memoir beats Darwin to win science book title." The Guardian, Friday 20 October 2006, URL accessed 30 March 2012.
^ ^a ^b Angier p 50.
^ Angier p 44.
^ Angier p 62.
^ Thomson p 40.
^ Thomson p 42.
^ Thomson p 48.
^ It is often reported that Pavese was Levi's teacher of Italian. This myth is refuted strongly by Thomson (2002).
^ Thomson p 55.
^ The Search for Roots, p 31.
^ Johnson, P. (1988). A History of the Jews. New York: Perennial Library, p. 501
^ Thomson p 93.
^ Angier p 174.
^ Thomson p 119.
^ Thomson p 229.
^ Thomson p 241.
^ ^a ^b Thomson p 246.
^ Thomson p 249.
^ If this is Man Chapter - 'The Events of Summer'
^ Angier p 487
^ Thomson p 287.
^ Thomson p 366.
^ The Guardian, 21 October 2006
^ Thomson p 400.
^ Commandant of Auschwitz : Rudolf Höß. ISBN 1-84212-024-7
^ Angier p 80.
^ The Drowned and the Saved (1986) Abacus edition (1988) p. 100.
^ . Levi gives no source for these figures. Appendix to an Italian schools edition of Se questo è un uomo, section 6, reprinted in; Se questo è un uomo, La tregua; Einaudi, Torino (1989) p. 340
^ Appendix to an Italian schools edition of Se questo è un uomo, section 6, reprinted in: Se questo è un uomo- La tregua Einaudi, Torino (1989) p. 339 "... nei Lager tedeschi la strage era pressoché totale: non si fermava neppure davanti ai bambini, che furono uccisi nelle camere a gas a centinaia di migliaia, cosa unica fra tutte le atrocità della storia umana."
^ (Abacus 2001 edition, p. 391)
^ [1] George Jochnowitz, review of Primo Levi: A Life by Ian Thomson. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2003
^ [2]
^ Gambetta, Diego, "Primo Levi's Last Moments", http://www.bostonreview.net/BR24.3/gambetta.html (retrieved on 2008-04-30)
^ [3]
^ The Noise (cd) by Peter Hammill 1993
^ Jews With Tattoos – Boston Globe Aug 15, 2004.
^ Hitchens, The Portable Atheist.
^ See the end credits of Into the Wild.
^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0252480/

Angier, Carole (2002). The Double Bond: Primo Levi: A Biography. London: Penguin. ISBN 0-14-016587-8.
Anissimov, Myriam (1999). Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist. New York: Overlook. ISBN 0-87951-806-5.
Thomson, Ian (2002). Primo Levi. London: Hutchison. ISBN 0-09-178531-6.
Vincenti, Fiora (1981). Primo Levi. Mursia.
Gordon, Robert (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. Cambridge: Cambridge. ISBN 978-0-521-60461-1.

External links [link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Primo Levi

International Primo Levi Studies Center
Centro Primo Levi New York
"Primo Levi's journeys of peace": an article in the TLS by Clive Sinclair, July 11, 2007
Scriptorium - Primo Levi Includes writing by Levi
Primo Levi page by the Operatist who composed in honour of Levi
Primo Levi's Last Moments by Diego Gambetta, Boston Review, Summer 1999 issue.
Gabriel Motola (Spring 1995). "Primo Levi, The Art of Fiction No. 140". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1670/the-art-of-fiction-no-140-primo-levi.
Al visitatore: Primo Levi's text for the Italian Memorial in Auschwitz, 1980
Primo Levi, biography and bibliography
Primo Levi's house
BBC Interview with Primo Levi
Lorenzo Perrone - Primo Levi's rescuer in Auschwitz

Chemistry portal

v t e Works by Primo Levi

Novels	The Wrench If Not Now, When?

Short story collections	The Sixth Day and Other Tales The Periodic Table The Search for Roots A Tranquil Star The Mirror Maker

Essay collections	Other People's Trades The Drowned and the Saved The Mirror Maker The Black Hole of Auschwitz

Poetry	The Search for Roots Collected Poems

Non-fiction	If This Is a Man The Truce Moments of Reprieve Auschwitz Report The Voice of Memory

Recipients of the Bagutta Prize

Recipients of the Strega Prize

Recipients of the Viareggio Prize

Anselmo Bucci – Lorenzo Viani (1930) · Corrado Tumiati (1931) · Antonio Foschini (1932) · Achille Campanile (1933) · Raffaele Calzini (1934) · Mario Massa – Stefano Pirandello (1935) · Riccardo Bacchelli (1936) · Guelfo Civinini (1937) · Vittorio Giovanni Rossi – Enrico Pea (1938) · Arnaldo Frateili – Orio Vergani – Maria Bellonci (1939) · Silvio Micheli – Umberto Saba (1946) · Antonio Gramsci (1947) · Aldo Palazzeschi – Elsa Morante – Sibilla Aleramo (1948) · Arturo Carlo Jemolo – Renata Viganò (1949) – Francesco Jovine – Carlo Bernari (1950) · Domenico Rea (1951) · Tommaso Fiore (1952) · Carlo Emilio Gadda (1953) · Rocco Scotellaro (1954) · Vasco Pratolini (1955) · Carlo Levi – Gianna Manzini (1956) · Italo Calvino – Pier Paolo Pasolini (1957) · Ernesto De Martino (1958) · Marino Moretti (1959) · Giovanni Battista Angioletti (1960) · Alberto Moravia (1961) · Giorgio Bassani (1962) · Antonio Delfini – Sergio Solmi (1963) · Giuseppe Berto (1964) · Goffredo Parise (1965) · Ottiero Ottieri – Alfonso Gatto (1966) · Raffaello Brignetti (1967) · Libero Bigiaretti (1968) · Fulvio Tomizza (1969) · Nello Saito (1970) · Ugo Attardi (1971) · Romano Bilenchi (1972) · Achille Campanile (1973) · Clotilde Marghieri (1974) · Paolo Volponi (1975) · Mario Tobino – Dario Bellezza – Sergio Solmi (1976) · Davide Lajolo (1977) · Antonio Altomonte – Mario Luzi (1978) · Giorgio Manganelli (1979) · Stefano Terra (1980) · Enzo Siciliano (1981) · Primo Levi (1982) · Giuliana Morandini (1983) · Gina Lagorio (1984) · Manlio Cancogni (1985) · Marisa Volpi (1986) · Mario Spinella (1987) · Rosetta Loy (1988) · Salvatore Mannuzzu (1989) · Luisa Adorno – Cesare Viviani – Maurizio Calvesi (1990) · Antonio Debenedetti (1991) · Luigi Malerba (1992) · Alessandro Baricco (1993) · Antonio Tabucchi (1994) · Maurizio Maggiani (1995) · Ermanno Rea – Alda Merini (1996) · Claudio Piersanti – Franca Grisone – Corrado Stajano (1997) · Giorgio Pressburger – Michele Sovente – Carlo Ginzburg (1998) · Ernesto Franco (1999) · Giorgio van Straten – Sandro Veronesi (2000) · Niccolò Ammaniti – Michele Ranchetti – Giorgio Pestelli (2001) · Jaeggy Fleur – Jolanda Insana – Alfonso Berardinelli (2002) · Giuseppe Montesano (2003) · Edoardo Albinati – Andrea Tagliapietra – Livia Livi (2004) · Raffaele La Capria – Alberto Arbasino – Milo de Angelis (2005) · Gianni Celati – Giovanni Agosti – Giuseppe Conte – Roberto Saviano (2006) · Filippo Tuena – Paolo Mauri – Silvia Bre – Simona Baldanzi – Paolo Colagrande – Paolo Fallai (2007) · Francesca Sanvitale – Miguel Gotor – Eugenio De Signoribus (2008)

Authority control: PND: 118572326 | LCCN: n79056057 | VIAF: 76319000 | SELIBR: 207643 | WorldCat

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Persondata
Name	Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea
Alternative names	Mussolini, Benito
Short description	Prime-Minister and fascist dictator of Italy
Date of birth	(1883-07-29)29 July 1883
Place of birth	Dovia di Predappio, Italy
Date of death	28 April 1945(1945-04-28)
Place of death	Giulino di Mezzegra, Italy

Awards and achievements
Preceded by Stephen O. Rice	IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal 1984	Succeeded by Charles K. Kao
Preceded by (First)	IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award 2007	Succeeded by Tim Berners-Lee

Persondata
Name	Viterbi, Andrew
Alternative names
Short description	Italian-American electrical engineer and businessman
Date of birth	1935-03-09
Place of birth	Bergamo, Italy
Date of death
Place of death

Persondata
Name	Levi, Primo
Alternative names
Short description	Italian chemist, memoirist, short story writer, novelist, essayist
Date of birth	31 July 1919
Place of birth	Turin, Italy
Date of death	11 April 1987
Place of death	Turin, Italy

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