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Key Points at a Glance
- Fascism — Birth in Italy (1919)
- Benito Mussolini founded Fasci di Combattimento (Combat Leagues) in 1919
- Name derived from fasces — bundle of rods, ancient Roman symbol of power
- Mussolini became Italy's Prime Minister on 28 October 1922 after the March on Rome
- King Victor Emmanuel III yielded rather than risk civil war
- Hitler's Early Career and NSDAP
- Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) joined the German Workers' Party in 1919
- Renamed it National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP/Nazi Party) in 1920
- Attempted the Munich Beer Hall Putsch (8–9 November 1923) — failed, imprisoned
- In prison wrote Mein Kampf (1925) — autobiographical manifesto laying out racial ideology
- Treaty of Versailles (1919) — Primary Grievance
- Imposed "war guilt" clause (Article 231) and reparations of 132 billion gold marks
- Germany lost 13% of its territory (Alsace-Lorraine; Rhineland demilitarised)
- Army reduced to 100,000; all colonies stripped away
- Germans called it the Diktat (dictated peace) — humiliation that fueled extreme nationalism
- Great Depression (1929–33) — Economic Trigger
- Germany's unemployment reached 6 million (30% of workforce) by January 1932
- Hyperinflation had already devastated savings — 1923: one US dollar = 4.2 trillion marks
- Economic catastrophe destroyed faith in the Weimar Republic
- Desperate voters turned to Hitler's promises of national regeneration
- Nazi Ideology — Six Pillars
- Racial supremacy: Aryan master race vs. Jews, Slavs, Roma as "subhumans" (Untermenschen)
- Anti-Semitism and anti-communism as core hatreds
- Extreme nationalism and Volksgemeinschaft (people's community)
- Führerprinzip — leader principle: absolute obedience to Hitler
- Lebensraum — living space: German expansion eastward at expense of "inferior" Slavs
- Hitler's Legal Seizure of Power (1933–34)
- Appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933 by conservatives who thought they could control him
- Reichstag Fire (27 February 1933) — blamed on Communists; civil liberties suspended via Decree
- Enabling Act (23 March 1933) gave Hitler dictatorial powers for 4 years — passed 444 to 84
- After Hindenburg's death (August 1934), Hitler merged both offices as Führer und Reichskanzler
- The Holocaust (Shoah) — Systematic Genocide
- Nazi Germany murdered approximately 6 million Jews (two-thirds of European Jewry)
- Also killed 5–6 million others: Roma, disabled people, Soviet POWs, Polish civilians, homosexuals
- Sites: extermination camps — Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec — in occupied Poland
- Nuremberg Laws (1935) had first stripped Jews of citizenship; Wannsee Conference (1942) coordinated the "Final Solution"
- Italian Fascism under Mussolini (Il Duce)
- Glorified the state, action, and violence; rejected democracy and communism
- Promoted aggressive nationalism and imperial expansion — invasion of Ethiopia (1935)
- Pursued the myth of a new Roman Empire dominating the Mediterranean
- Mussolini coined both the term "fascism" and the "Third Way" between capitalism and communism
- The Weimar Republic (1919–33) — A Democracy Undermined
- Germany's first democratic experiment — born in defeat, associated with national humiliation
- "Stab-in-the-back" myth (Dolchstoßlegende) blamed Jewish socialists for Germany's WWI defeat
- Survived hyperinflation (1923) and Great Depression (1929–33), but was never accepted by army, judiciary, or conservative elites
- Those same conservative elites eventually handed power to Hitler — a fatal miscalculation
- Night of the Long Knives & Kristallnacht
- Night of the Long Knives (30 June 1934): Hitler had SA leader Ernst Röhm and 200+ murdered to appease the army
- This consolidated Hitler's internal power and elevated the SS over the SA
- Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938): Nazi pogrom — 7,500 shops smashed, 1,400 synagogues burned, 30,000 Jews arrested
- Kristallnacht was a decisive turning point signalling the shift toward genocide
- The Axis Alliance and Road to WWII
- Italy and Germany formed the Rome-Berlin Axis (October 1936); Japan joined via Tripartite Pact (September 1940)
- Hitler's territorial annexations: Austria/Anschluss (March 1938) and Czechoslovakia (1938–39)
- Invasion of Poland (1 September 1939) triggered WWII
- This aggressive Axis alliance made global war inevitable