Little more than the outward appearance of loyalty to the leader was required, and after a few years most people became masters at the game. Mussolini was a superb actor, his subordinates great performers, but the nation at large was a well-rehearsed performance. The penalties for breaking character were harsh. A totalitarian police state had emerged after the Matteotti affair in 1925, and by the mid-1930s it had acquired enormous powers, going to great lengths to put the population under surveillance. The political police, known as PolPol, worked hand in hand with Ovra, or Organisation for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism, referred to in short as piovra, or ‘octopus’, its tentacles reaching far and wide. There were also the regular state police and the local carabinieri, who were part of the army. There were five special militia for the railways, roads, post, telegraph and telephone services, the ports and the forests. The capital had a metropolitan militia, with some 12,000 agents making the rounds in civilian clothes. Envious neighbours, jealous colleagues or even disaffected members of the same family reported on suspicious conversations. Few people would have dared to speak openly in the presence of more than three others. As one observer put it, Italy was a ‘nation of prisoners, condemned to enthusiasm’.77
Despite the full weight of the police state, enthusiasm for the leader waned in 1939. Underground newspapers were growing in circulation, some apparently printed on the presses of the Popolo d’Italia itself. The credibility of the leader came under attack. One fascist follower opined that the regime represented a mere 30,000 people at most. Nobody believed any longer in the parades, asserted one report from Rome, while people were unhappy with empty shelves in the shops caused by the economic sanctions imposed by the League of Nations. The obligatory newsreels shown in cinemas no longer prompted respectful silence, as viewers used the cover of dark to boo or laugh irreverently. The letter M, seen everywhere in honour of Mussolini, stood for misery, people joked.78
Mussolini, fully aware of growing popular disaffection through the secret services, realised that he had to show that his star was still shining brightly with a series of quick successes in war. In June 1940 he was ready to stake his fortune and that of his country by declaring war on France and Great Britain. ‘May God help Italy,’ wrote his son-in-law.79
In the early hours of 28 October 1940, the Italian army crossed the Albanian border to invade Greece. Since Berlin had not informed Mussolini beforehand of their plans to invade Poland, the Netherlands and France, the Duce thought he should surprise Hitler in turn. Mussolini’s own staff were kept in the dark. Rodolfo Graziani, now chief of the army staff, only heard of the invasion through the radio. Instead of conducting a lightning war, Italian troops became bogged down in poor weather and were pushed back into Albania within a few weeks. Britain intervened on Greece’s side, destroying half of Italy’s battle fleet.
‘We will break Greece’s back,’ Mussolini defiantly proclaimed on 18 November, as crowds dutifully cheered outside the Palazzo Venezia. The speech was distributed far and wide by the Ministry of Popular Culture, transmitted over the airwaves in seven languages. But many Italians did not believe their own leader, turning instead to British radio to discover what was happening inside their own country. Over the following three years some 60 million lire were spent on fighting clandestine radio programmes from London, to little avail.80
Mussolini was obliged to appeal to Hitler, who came to his rescue in April 1941. Within weeks, the Germans pushed through the Balkans and reached Athens, the Greek capital. There was a price to pay: military experts, economic advisers and secret agents now swarmed all over Italy, interfering in every aspect of the country’s affairs. The iron dictator seemed no more than a vassal. ‘We were treated, never like partners, but always as slaves,’ Ciano bitterly confided to his diary.81
Wherever the Duce sent his soldiers, they were defeated. A few months after the Tenth Army moved across the Libyan desert to invade Egypt in September 1940, British troops forced them back. In November 1941 the Italians made their last stand in the ancient imperial capital of Gondar, defeated by the Allied powers with the help of irregular Ethiopian troops. On the Eastern Front, where Mussolini had sent an army corps to help in the war against the Soviet Union, the Italians suffered heavy losses. By July 1942, Mussolini was a broken man, wracked by illness, isolated, disillusioned by the waning of his star. A close collaborator found him ‘grey, with sunken cheeks, troubled and tired eyes and his mouth revealing a sense of bitterness’.82
The man who had once been in full sight at all times, in the sky, in the sea, on earth, began disappearing from view, eschewing the public. For six months no new images of Mussolini, once described as ‘the most photographed man on earth’, were published. He also fell silent. On 10 June 1941 he had made a brief appearance to mark the first anniversary of Italy’s entry into the war, but for eighteen long months thereafter he was speechless.83
On 2 December 1942 Mussolini broke his silence, proving that he was still alive. But it was too little, too late. His voice had changed, people whispered. His speech was superficial. He seemed to have lost his grip on reality, confirming the impression that a leader driven by hubris was steering his country to ruin. Instead of whipping up hatred of the enemy, his speech turned people against him.84
From the beginning Mussolini had been forced to compete with the king and the pope for the allegiance of the Italian population. Mussolini’s image may have been everywhere, but it was the king’s head that appeared on stamps and coins. Mussolini was only head of government, while the king was head of state. And much as fascism had tried to emulate religion, it was the pope who commanded the loyalty of the country’s millions of Roman Catholics.
The Allied powers began bombing Italy ten days after Mussolini’s declaration of war in 1940. Almost every city became a target, carried out first by British fliers, then the United States. On 19 July 1943, as Allied planes targeted the capital for the first time, Pope Pius XII was seen visiting the damaged districts in a grubby white cassock, surrounded by devout residents, while Mussolini remained ensconced in his palace.85
For months people had accused Mussolini of having brought ruin and misery to their country. The Duce had betrayed Italy. He was a criminal, a murderer, a bloodthirsty tyrant. Some cursed him under their breath, others openly wished for his demise.86
The king delivered the final blow. As the acrid smell of smoke still hovered over Rome, the Grand Council of Fascists voted against their leader. One day later, on 25 July 1943, Victor Emmanuel placed Mussolini under arrest. Not a single party member rebelled, despite their solemn oath to protect Mussolini to the death. Achille Starace, like other fascist leaders, immediately tried to ingratiate himself with Pietro Badoglio, the first Duke of Addis Ababa and new head of government.87
The historian Emilio Gentile pointed out decades ago that a god who proved to be fallible ‘was destined to be dethroned and desecrated by his faithful with the same passion with which he had been adored’. In parts of Italy, angry crowds invaded the local Fascist Party headquarters on the very day of his arrest, flinging effigies, busts and portraits of the overthrown dictator out of the windows.88
Mussolini had one friend left, however. The humiliating demise of a close ally was a threat to the image of the untouchable and sacred leader, and Hitler organised a daring rescue operation, sending a group of commandoes to free Mussolini and fly him to freedom. A week earlier, on 3 September 1943, Italy had signed an armistice, prompting German troops to take over the country. Now, as war tore the country apart, they installed Mussolini in Salò to head a new regime, the Italian Social Republic. Mussolini’s main achievement was a series of executions of fascist leaders who had voted against him at the last meeting of the Grand Council. His own son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, was tied to a chair and shot in the back.
In a January 1945 interview with Madeleine Mollier, wife of the press attaché at the German Embassy, Mussolini seemed resigned to his fate, describing himself as ‘little more than
a corpse’. ‘Yes, madam, I am finished. My star has fallen,’ he continued. ‘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 the spectators.’ The end came a few months later, when he was captured by anti-fascist partisans. He and several of his followers, including his mistress Clara Petacci, were summarily shot, their bodies piled into a van and taken to Milan. They were hung upside down from a girder. Achille Starace, arrested shortly afterwards, was taken to see the remains of his leader, then executed and strung up next to the man he had acclaimed as a god.89
In the months that followed people sang the fascist hymn with unveiled sarcasm, chiselling away at the symbols of the past dictatorship on buildings and monuments across the country, smashing the statues of their former leader. They blamed only Mussolini, a view made credible, rather paradoxically, by the cult of personality itself. ‘One man, and one man alone,’ Churchill had famously said in December 1940, absolving all fascists of any responsibility.90
2
Hitler
‘As I walked with him in the gardens of the Villa Borghese,’ Hitler told his guests at a dinner party on 21 July 1941 while the Luftwaffe was bombing Moscow, ‘I could easily compare his profile with that of the Roman busts, and I realised he was one of the Ceasars.’ The Duce’s March on Rome, he explained, was a turning point in history. ‘The brownshirts would probably not have existed without the blackshirts.’1
Two decades earlier, the Nazi Party, still in its infancy with less than 10,000 members, had been galvanised by the March on Rome, hailing Adolf Hitler as ‘Germany’s Mussolini’ on 3 November 1922. Just as Mussolini presented himself to his people as the Duce, party members now began to refer to Hitler as the Führer, the German word for leader.2
Only three years earlier, when Hitler had given his first political speech at a beer hall in Munich, few could have predicted his rise to power. As a young man he had hoped to become an artist in Vienna, but was twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts. He enjoyed a bohemian lifestyle, reading widely and pursuing his passion for opera and architecture.
In 1914, having been deemed unfit for service in the Austro-Hungarian army, he managed to enlist in the Bavarian army instead. He took part in some of the bloodiest battles of the First World War and was temporarily blinded by a British gas shell in October 1918. In hospital, he learned of Germany’s military collapse and was overcome with despair, which turned into hatred overnight. Like many other nationalists, he believed that the army had been stabbed in the back, betrayed by civilian leaders who had overthrown the Hohenzollern dynasty to establish the Weimar Republic and sign an armistice in the November Revolution.
Hitler returned to Munich, where he had lived before the outbreak of war. He found a city draped in red flags, as the socialist premier Kurt Eisner had established a Free State of Bavaria following the abolition of the Wittelsbach monarchy in November 1918. Eisner’s assassination a few months later prompted an uprising among some of the workers, who rushed to proclaim a Bavarian Soviet Republic. It was a short-lived experiment, brutally crushed by government troops and paramilitary volunteers. In the wake of the failed revolution, Hitler was tasked with lecturing soldiers returning from the front against the perils of communism. He thrived, discovering that he had a talent: ‘What I had earlier always assumed to be true without knowing it now happened: I could “speak”.’3
His oratorical skills caught the attention of Anton Drexler, founder of the German Workers’ Party (DAP), a loosely organised group of conservatives who mixed nationalism with anti-capitalism in an effort to appeal to larger segments of the population. Hitler joined the party in September 1919, soon becoming their most influential speaker, as people flocked to listen to him. An early follower remembered being unimpressed by a man who looked like ‘a waiter in a railway-station restaurant’, with heavy boots, a leather waistcoat and an odd little moustache. But once Hitler began speaking, he electrified the audience. ‘In his early years he had a command of voice, phrase and effect which has never been equalled, and on this evening he was at his best.’ He would begin in a quiet, reserved manner, but gradually build up momentum, using simple language that ordinary people could understand. As he warmed to his subject, he began attacking Jews, chastising the Kaiser, thundering against war profiteers, speaking more and more rapidly with dramatic hand gestures, a finger occasionally stabbing the air. He knew how to tailor his message to his listeners, giving voice to their hatred and hope. ‘The audience responded with a final outburst of frenzied cheering and hand-clapping.’ By 1921 Hitler could fill as large a venue as the Circus Krone in Munich with more than 6,000 followers.4
In February 1920 the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP, or Nazi Party). Soon it acquired a heavily indebted newspaper called Völkischer Beobachter, originally published by the Thule Society, a secretive group of occultists who used the swastika as their symbol and believed in the coming of a German messiah to redeem the nation. Dietrich Eckart, the newspaper’s new editor, had pinned his hopes on a journalist called Wolfgang Kapp. In March 1920 Kapp and some 6,000 supporters attempted a putsch against the Weimar Republic in Berlin, but failed after the rank and file of the state administration went on strike. Now Eckhart turned towards Hitler, seeing him as the ‘saviour of the fatherland’. Twenty years his senior, Eckhart became his mentor, helping him build up his image, using the Völkischer Beobachter to portray Hitler as Germany’s next great man.5
In the summer of 1921 the party leadership welcomed the arrival of another ‘popular and powerful speaker’, the leader of a rival organisation called the German Working Association. They proposed a merger. Hitler saw this as a threat to his own position and gambled by tendering his resignation in a fit of anger. Everything hinged on Eckhart, who mediated. Fearful of losing their main attraction, the leadership relented. But Hitler now demanded to be ‘chairman with dictatorial powers’. A few months later Eckhart gushed in the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter that nobody was more selfless, upright and devoted than Hitler, who had intervened in the fate of the party with an ‘iron fist’.6
The moment Hitler captured power within the Nazi Party he established a paramilitary organisation called the SA (an abbreviation of Sturmabteilung, or Assault Division). Ernst Röhm, a loyal follower, made sure they thrashed dissenters who tried to shout Hitler down in public meetings. The SA also roamed the streets of Munich, beating up their enemies and disrupting events organised by the political opposition.
The Nazi Party was now the Führer’s party, and Hitler worked tirelessly at building it up. He designed the garish red flyers used to recruit new members, and he oversaw the parades, flags, pennants, marching bands and music that drew ever larger crowds. Hitler was a meticulous choreographer, attending to every detail. On 17 September 1921 instructions were published to prescribe the exact dimensions and colour scheme of the swastika armband. The brown shirts were introduced after Mussolini marched on Rome.7
Like Mussolini, Hitler also gave careful thought as to how best to present himself to the outside world. When an earlier follower suggested that he should either grow a full moustache or clip it, he was unmoved. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I am setting a fashion. As time goes on people will be pleased to copy it.’ The moustache was as much a trademark as the brown shirt. Hitler, again like Mussolini, was short-sighted, but made sure never to be seen in public wearing his spectacles. Wary of facilitating recognition by the police, Hitler – unlike his Italian counterpart – shunned photographers. As his reputation grew, speculation about his appearance added an aura of mystery. Only in the autumn of 1923 did Hitler consent to having his portrait taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, who would soon become the party’s official photographer. These first images projected sheer determination and fanatical willpower, showing a grim look, raised eyebrows, lips pressed together, arms resolutely folded. The photographs circulated widely in the press and were sold as postca
rds and portraits.8
As Adolf Hitler turned thirty-four on 20 April 1923 the cult of the leader was launched. A banner on the front page of the party’s mouthpiece hailed him as ‘Germany’s Führer’. Alfred Rosenberg, another earlier ally, celebrated Hitler as the ‘Leader of the German Nation’, writing about how the man in Munich established a ‘mysterious interaction’ between himself and his many followers. Hitler, on the other hand, all too aware that his enemies called him a demagogue, a tyrant, a megalomaniac ‘Majesty Adolf I’, described himself in self-deprecating terms as ‘nothing but a drummer and gatherer’, a mere apostle waiting for the Christ.9
This was all false modesty. As Eckart himself reported, an impatient Hitler could be seen pacing up and down the courtyard shouting, ‘I must enter Berlin like Christ in the Temple of Jerusalem and scourge out the moneylenders.’ Seeking to emulate Mussolini, on 8 November 1923 he staged a coup by storming a beer hall in Munich with the SA, announcing the formation of a new government with General Erich von Ludendorff, head of the German military during the First World War. The army did not join the rebels. The police easily crushed the coup the following day. Hitler was arrested.10
The Beer Hall Putsch had failed. Hitler, behind bars, sank into depression, but soon regained his poise, recognising that martyrdom beckoned. Widespread press coverage established his notoriety at home and abroad. People from all over the country sent presents, and even some of his guards whispered ‘Heil Hitler’ when they entered the small suite of rooms that served as his cell. The judges at his trial were sympathetic, allowing Hitler to use the courtroom as a propaganda platform, his words reported in every newspaper. He appeared before the court not as defendant but as accuser, portraying the Weimar Republic as the real criminals. He assumed sole responsibility for the putsch. ‘I alone bear the responsibility,’ he admitted. ‘If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the revolution. There is no such thing as high treason against the traitors of 1918.’ Now he scoffed at the idea that he was merely the drummer in a patriotic movement. ‘My aim from the first was a thousand times higher … I wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism.’11
How to Be a Dictator Page 5