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Editor says, what if Mussolini had died in 1922? Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s). This story was published in the June 2012 edition of Changing the Times Magazine.
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In 1922, the rising political violence in post-war Italy reached a frightening new level of intensity with the shocking death of the thirty-nine year old leader of the National Fascist Party Benito Mussolini during his ill-fated March on Rome.
Earlier Death of MussoliniBorn in a run-down house in the shadow of a medieval castle, his twisted dreams of grandeur began with his christening. He was named after Benito Juarez the republican leader of a Mexican uprising against the domination of the Church and aristocacy. Despite numerous childhood expulsions and suspensions he entered the teaching profession before the outbreak of the Great War. After the peace settlement, he used his war-time experiences to set about forming a paramilitary organization the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento ("Italian Fasci of Combat").
Elected to the Chamber of Deputies on the second attempt, he took matters into his own hands by launching a naked grab for power in 1922. In a violent confrontation, his twenty-five thousand blackshirts were stopped by the authorities and anti-fascist forces, and due to his hot headedness, he lost his life in the street-fighting. And in Germany, his erstwhile protégé Adolf Hitler was shocked to the core to read that Mussolini had conducted various affairs with a Jewish author and academic by the name of Margherita Sarfatti. But the failure of the Italian fascist movement would have longer term effects upon his own project. To combat the Biennio Rosso the military would push the monarchy aside and takeover the country, an outcome paralleled in Spain. That would ensure Hitler's Germany was surrounded by like-minded authoritarian militaristic states who ironically were utterly unwilling to go to war.
Entry posted by Todayinah Editor
© Alternate Historian, 2004-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Politicians Source: Wikipedia Labels: Benito Mussolini, Fascists, Italy, March on Rome, Fascism. Editor says, in this article we repurpose significant amounts of content from Wikipedia and relied upon helpful suggestions from Jeff Provine who writes ~ "That would DEFINITELY change things. Apparently hitler stole a lot of Mussolini's ideas when putting together German fascism (even the word "fascism"). He also stole Chaplin's mustache, for which Chaplin never forgave him (seriously)". Our reference text is "Understanding Mussolini's Italy" (2012) by David Evans.
~ This could have changed everything....
~ The ideas were out there. Everyone did mix and match from the same collection of futurism, mass nationalism, etc. Hitler never had an original ideological idea in his life. His genius as it were was melding a set of resentments and local movements into a national party. Even then, but for the implosion of the Weimar Coalition over the economic collapse all Adolph had built was a fringe protest movement that was a money machine for himself from sales of his book.
~ But Hitler was very much inspired and influenced by Mussolini, to the point where his Nazis were originally called the German Fascisti. This appears in a wonderful new book called Hitlerland, about the Americans in Hitler's Germany.It makes us wonder where Hitler had been without Mussolini's example.
~ Yes Benny the Moose was an example. Also a source of some key early funding. However the basic fusion of National Bolshevism with a Volkish set of disgruntled veterans was quite German. Google for Streicher, the Strasser brothers etc. Hitler fused these local and regional movements into one party 1924-1928. Fest's biography of Hitler covers this well.
~ I'm not sure that Hitler and Musso even knew each other existed as far back as 1922. Another interesting possibility would be to have Benny stay out of WWII...he might be remembered as a brilliant Italian statesman if he had.
~ Ah the Italian Franco AH...
~ Citing Hitlerland again: In 1922, one of the American reporters was calling Hitler "The German Mussolini."
~ With a neutral Italy, the whole scope of Hitler's planned "Axis" would change. No need for combat in North Africa; he might've headed for Soviet oilfields instead, then Egypt/India.
~ The 2-3 divisions in the Afrika Korps would have been spare change in Russia. The number of trucks needed to supply them would not. Per one of Creveld's books Rommel needed more heavy trucks than an army group in the East 1941-42. The other big change is that Second Air Fleet is not pulled out of Belarus November 1941 to stabilize the situation in the Med. A lot of the collapse before Moscow comes from the halving of the air support.
~ And, certainly, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 would have been avoided, not to mention all the lives saved in North Africa, and in America's painful campaign in Italy.
~ If Hitler's Germany were "surrounded by like-minded authoritarian militaristic states who ironically were utterly unwilling to go to war," there's a strong possibility that World War II as we know it would never have happened at all. While Italy was somewhat the weak link in the Axis, its actual absence would have left the Fuehrer with no military parter in Central/Western Europe. Hitler's march ro conquest might have stalled after Czechoslovakia, or perhaps even after the Anschluss.
If, however, in these changed circumstances Stalin had decided to attack Poland on his own, a cynical Hitler might actually have enlisted the support of Britain and France against the Bolshevist" threat in the East. It's anyone's guess, though, whether Stalin would have dared: theSoviet Army was far weaker at that time than it would be later, and the Soviet dictator might not have wanted t take the chance.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
