570Chapter 28
exploited their control of the courts and local govern-
ment, used direct intimidation and violence as needed,
and relied on outright fraud in counting the votes. This
combination earned the Fascists a two-thirds majority
in Parliament and a Fascist government. When a leader
of the Socialist Party, Giacomo Matteotti (whose book
The Fascisti Exposedhad detailed Fascist political vio-
lence), denounced this undemocratic seizure of power,
Fascist thugs kidnapped him and stabbed him to death.
When socialist, liberal, and Catholic deputies walked
out of Parliament in a protest known as the Aventine
Secession, the Fascist majority permanently expelled
them. Critical journalists were jailed.
The Fascist dictatorship in Italy quickly uprooted
democratic society. All opposition parties—monarchical,
democratic, Catholic, and socialist—were abolished,
creating a one-party state. Universal suffrage was abol-
ished and voting was defined by the amount of taxes
paid. A Fascist Grand Council named members of
Parliament and voters ratified their selections. Mus-
solini kept the power to govern by decree. Strict press
censorship was installed. All local officials were made
appointive. A secret police (the OVRA) cracked down
on opponents of the regime, armed with a law permit-
ting capital punishment for political offenses. Despite
such powers, Mussolini never created a total dictator-
ship because he never broke the independent power
of the army, the Catholic Church, or the wealthy
upper classes.
The Fascist regime focused its attention on eco-
nomic recovery, and it had noteworthy successes al-
though problems remained. Mussolini abandoned
capitalism in favor of state planning and state interven-
tion, but he kept private property and profit. These
steps never achieved the self-sufficient economy he
sought. The Battle for Wheat increased farm acreage
and production, but Italy remained dependent on im-
ports. Unemployment was cut sharply by extending ed-
ucation, expanding the army, and hiring thousands for
public works projects (such as draining swamps to be-
come farmland). Labor unrest was controlled by abol-
ishing trade unions and outlawing strikes; management
was regulated and made to accept state arbitration. To
keep a tranquil economy and state direction of it, Mus-
solini created what he called “the corporate state.” All
occupations were organized into “syndicates” (a syndi-
cate even existed for intellectuals); groups of syndicates
were linked as “corporations.” Representatives of occu-
pations met in a quasi-legislative body called the Na-
tional Council of Corporations. The council and a
Ministry of Corporations theoretically directed the
economy, but the corporate state never had perfectly
defined powers. It generally supported propertied inter-
ests and management, and its biggest creation was a
bloated bureaucracy.Hitler and Nazi Germany, 1928–39
Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party similarly exploited
the legacies of World War I—angry nationalism and
economic crisis—in Germany. Like Mussolini and the
Fascists, they mixed the legitimate political process
with violence to seize power, destroy democracy, and
build a dictatorship.
The Nazis remained a small and ineffective party
during the Weimar recovery of the mid-1920s. In the
parliamentary elections of 1928, the Nazi Party had a
membership of 100,000 and received a meager 2.6 per-
cent of the votes cast. The party attracted some support
for its strident nationalism and denunciation of the Ver-
sailles Treaty, but its growth chiefly came during eco-
nomic crisis. Although the full name of the party
(German National Socialist Workers’ Party) suggests
that it was a working-class party, most urban workers
voted against the Nazis; instead, the Nazis drew their
electoral strength from small farmers and the lower
middle class occupations known as the Mittelstand
(chiefly small shopkeepers, artisans, and retail mer-
chants). Such groups had suffered greatly in the nation’s
ordeal since 1914, were strongly nationalistic, vulnera-
ble to economic crises, and without strong voices in the
political process. When the depression hit Germany in
1930, many people saw a solution in strong leadership.
Adolph Hitler seized power through the political
crisis of the German depression. Reichstag elections in
1930 showed frightened voters seeking new solutions:
Both the Communist Party and the Nazi Party regis-
tered large gains, with Hitler now leading a delegation
of 107 deputies. Part of this electoral success stemmed
from the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda, managed by
Josef Goebbels and presented in spell-casting oratory
by Hitler. Goebbels, the chief author of fulsome Nazi
propaganda images of a tall, blond, Aryan race of su-
permen, was himself a short and dark-haired man with
a withered foot from childhood polio. In addition to
artful propaganda, Nazi success resulted from using the
intimidation and violence that Mussolini had taught.
Nazi stormtroops—at first the brown-shirted SA (short
for Sturmabteilungen,literally “storm troopers”) and later
Heinrich Himmler’s black-shirted SS (short for
Schutzstaffelor “defense echelon”)—fought street battles,