1034 Ch. 25 • Economic Depression and Dictatorshipqueen, pawned their wedding rings (women who turned in their gold rings
received in exchange tin ones blessed by the pope) to help raise money for
the war of conquest. The Duce correctly assessed that Britain and France
would do little more than denounce the invasion because they still desired
Mussolini’s support against Hitler. Realizing this, Hitler had encouraged
Italy to attack Ethiopia.
Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie (1892-1975) appealed to the League
of Nations for help for his country, which had been a member nation since
- The League imposed economic sanctions against Italy, but left them
weak by excluding oil from the list of products affected, and it did not try to
prevent passage of Italian ships through the Suez Canal on the way to
Ethiopia. The British government made it clear that it considered the
appeasement of Italy the only way to end the crisis and placed an embargo
against the sale of arms to Ethiopia. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt
even offered Italy American loans in order to develop Ethiopia.
Italian troops took the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa in May 1936.
Over 500,000 Ethiopians were killed in the one-sided fighting. Italy lost
only 5,000 soldiers, a number Mussolini decried as so small that it seemed
to cheapen his victory. On July 15, 1936, the League of Nations formally
lifted all sanctions against Italy. The Stresa agreement, which had been
made with the goal of containing Hitler, collapsed. The Duce now began
referring to himself as the “invincible Duce.”
Remilitarization and RearmamentOn March 7, 1936, German troops moved into the Rhineland, which had
been declared by the Treaty of Versailles to be a demilitarized zone. Hitler
had secretly promised his anxious generals that he would order German
forces to pull back if the French army intervened. Whether or not an
armed British and French response might have stopped Hitler at this point
has long been debated.
German ambassadors in the European capitals then claimed that the
move had been necessitated by the destruction of the Locarno agreements
by France’s pact with the Soviet Union. The German ambassador to Britain,
Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893-1946, who had simply added the aristocratic
“von” to his name), failed to browbeat the British into an alliance with Ger
many. France pushed the British government to react sharply against Hitler’s
brazen move, but would not act alone. In Germany, Hitler’s prestige soared.
He had delivered as promised, facing down the powers that had imposed
the Treaty of Versailles and destroying the Locarno Treaty.
Hitler now speeded up the pace of German rearmament, particularly of
the air force. By 1938, armament production absorbed 52 percent of state
expenses and 17 percent of Germany’s gross national product. Prodded by
the Labour Party, British military expenses more than doubled between 1934
and 1937; however, the total amount was far less than what Germany spent