Stalin

in a sense, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was a brilliant move on Stalin's part, since
it gave him an opportunity to drastically improve his country's strategic
position along its western border, without getting involved in a larger
conflict. While Hitler's Blitzkrieg flattened Poland, Soviet troops took
possession of the eastern half of that unlucky country, which Germany
and the U.S.S.R. shortly agreed to share. Then, in October of 1939, the
U.S.S.R. "convinced" the Baltic States--Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia,
independent since the Revolution--to allow Soviet garrisons to come
within their borders. This paved the way for these states' outright
annexation to the U.S.S.R. the following year. The Soviets applied similar
pressure to Finland, which had been a Grand Duchy under the rule of the
Tsars; but the Finns resisted, however, and in November of '39 Stalin
ordered an invasion. He expected a quick, easy war, but amid wintry
conditions the Red Army (which had, after all, seen its generals purged
only a few years before) suffered a series of setbacks. Not until spring of
the following year did the Finns capitulate.
By that time, Hitler's armies were racing across France, winning
astonishing victories and forcing the French from the war after just a few
months of battle. Although the British still remained autonomous on their
sea-fenced isle, Nazi Germany stood as the unquestionable master of
continental Europe. This left Hitler free to turn on Stalin without fear of
attack from the west. But for the next year, while the Nazi leader prepared
to launch "Operation Barbarossa" against Russia, Stalin did little to
prepare for invasion. Indeed, from the beginning of the Nazi-Soviet pact,
the Soviet dictator behaved curiously--he went out of his way to help his
new ally, purifying his propaganda of all anti- Fascist rhetoric, eagerly
supplying the Germans with raw materials, and even going so far as to
return German Communists who had sought sanctuary in the Soviet
Union. (These luckless men and women went straight to concentration
camps.) All through the spring of 1941, as his subordinates reported that
German troops were gathering on the Polish borders, Stalin seems to have
convinced himself that these measures did not prefigure war. One might
offer a number of reasons for this: Stalin's own anti-Semitism might have
made him sympathetic to the Nazis; perhaps he felt an affinity for Hitler
as a fellow dictator; he might have seen the stridently anti-bourgeois
Nazis as being closer to Marxism than the decadent capitalist Allies. But
the simplest explanation is that Stalin, who did not desire war (indeed, he
feared it) was indulging in wishful thinking--wishful thinking that no one, in
the fear-laced atmosphere of the Soviet Union, dared to question.

(One other event of 1940 is worth noting--the murder, by a pick-axe to the

head, of the exiled Trotsky in Mexico City. Stalin had long since come to
regret not having killed his rival, and for years his agents had pursued
Trotsky across Europe and South America. With Trotsky's death, the last
member of Lenin's Politburo--save Stalin, of course--passed from the
earth.)
"What have we done to deserve this?" Molotov would ask plaintively on
June 21, 1941, when German troops rolled through the U.S.S.R.'s border
defenses and poured into the Soviet heartland. Stalin was equally
distraught, and when it became clear that his armies were falling back in
disorder, and that a counter- attack would fail, he sank into a state of
shock that seemed to paralyze him for more than a week, while the
invaders drove ever deeper into the Soviet Union. It was not until July 3
that Stalin mustered the willpower to make a national radio address, in
which he called for national unity in the face of the crisis. The following
month, he officially assumed supreme command of the Red Army, a
position he would hold until the end of the war.

But Stalin's leadership was not enough to save his country. Soviet forces
had not been mobilized in June of 1941, their equipment was outdated,
and their leadership, after the purges, was utterly lacking in experience.
By autumn of 1941, they had fallen back all along the vast 2,000-mile
front. The Ukraine was in German hands, as was Crimea and the Baltic
States; German troops were besieging Leningrad (St. Petersburg had
undergone a second renaming after becoming Petrograd during WWI) and
Sebastopol. Moscow itself was threatened, and only saved by the onset of
winter, when a Red Army counterattack finally halted the German
advance. In these months, Stalin began to panic: acting through Lavrenti
Beria, one of his chief advisors, he made contact with the Nazis and
offered vast territorial concessions in return for peace. The offer was
rejected, however, and the war went on. Stalin contemplated fleeing
Moscow.

Summer of 1942 marked the low-point for the beleaguered Soviets and
their new allies, the British and the Americans, who had been brought into
the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941.
While the Germans and Japanese advanced in North Africa and the Pacific,
Hitler launched a new offensive into the Caucasus, seeking to capture the
oil fields around Baku. Stalin's armies were driven back again, all the way
to the city of Tsaritsyn, now renamed Stalingrad, where he had
commanded the Red Army during the civil war. But there the tide turned.
In a momentous battle, lasting from August 1942 to February of 1943, the
Germans suffered a terrible defeat; the Soviets trapped the German
troops within the ruins of Stalingrad and annihilated them. Stalin had
found a great general in George Zhukov, and now that the military muscle
of the United States had joined the war, Germany and Japan were
gradually forced to retreat. The Red Army drove the Nazi armies back, out
of Russia, and then penetrated into Germany itself, while the Allies
invaded France in 1944 and drove eastward. Hitler, his power undone,
committed suicide April 31, 1945, effectively ending the fighting in
Europe. Four months later, the United States detonated two atomic bombs
in Japan, leading to the Japanese surrender and the end of World War II.
Throughout his meetings with the two western leaders, President Franklin
Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Stalin pushed for
military and economic assistance for the Soviet Union while demanding
that they recognize Soviet dominance of Eastern and Central Europe. At
the Tehran Conference in 1943, and again at Yalta in February of 1945, he
pushed them to allow what amounted to a "Soviet bloc" extending from
the Baltic States across Poland and into Germany, and then down through
Southern Europe into Yugoslavia.

Stalin had begun this Soviet-ization with the murder of 15,000 Polish army
officers in the Katyn Forest in April 1940, and while the German invasion
had interrupted the effort, he was eager to clamp down again. Roosevelt
and Churchill, unwilling to antagonize their ally, essentially gave in to his
demands--although given the circumstances, they had little choice.
(Neither knew that Stalin's spies were at work in the United States, and
had already sent information on the atomic bomb project back to Russia,
where Soviet scientists were hard at work on their own nuclear weapon.)
Churchill appreciated the sacrifices the Russians had made during the
war, and wanted to be conciliatory toward them, and Roosevelt seems to
have decided that he could "manage" Stalin. But the West would soon
have cause to regret these attitudes.

At the close of the Second World War, the Soviet people, who had borne
so many burdens during the conflict, now harbored the hope that their
lives would improve. To Stalin's mind, of course, such thinking presented a
danger: if people began to long for something better, they might rebel.
Thus he now began a drive to maintain control at all costs. His inner circle
was shaken up: Lavrenti Beria remained in power as head of the secret
police, but Molotov began to fade into the background, and Georgi
Malenkov, who had enjoyed Stalin's trust since the beginning of the war,
was replaced by Andrei Hanoi, who led a renewed ideological offensive.
Soldiers who had seen too much of the prosperous West were interned in
camps to keep them from "infecting" the population with subversive
ideas; there was a new purge of the military, in which even the great
Zhukov was reduced a minor provincial command; and a new cultural
offensive was launched against newspapers and other literature
considered threatening to the regime. The Western Allies, now Soviet
enemies in the fight for global influence, came under heavy attack in the
press, where Stalinist writers invented imagined atrocities and attributed
them to the Americans and the British. Meanwhile, "Praising American
Democracy" received listing in secret police handbooks as grounds for
arrest.

The post-war conflict with the West came as no surprise to Stalin. In part,
it constituted a continuation of the Marxist dream of world revolution, a
dream revived by a series of Communist uprisings from Greece to China in
the late 1940s. In part, it was a reassertion of Russian nationalism that
went back to the Tsars. But most importantly, the Cold War that emerged
as the Soviets moved to expand their sphere of influence at the expense
of the West was a reflection of what may have been the most important
aspect of Stalin's peculiar personality: his unlimited will to power. He had
vanquished Trotsky and Zinoviev, Bukharin and Kamenev, and even the
German Reich; the United States was simply the latest in a long line of
rivals with whom he had jockeyed for supremacy.

Soviet foreign policy in the late 1940s, then, was characterized by a

steady belligerence, and the application of constant pressure on politically
sensitive areas. Eastern Europe quickly belonged to Stalin, as did East
Germany, and in February 1948 Stalinist forces seized power in
Czechoslovakia. At the same time, Moscow supported Communist forces
in the Greek Civil War, pressed Turkey to give up control of the Bosphorus,
backed Communist parties in Italy and France, supported Communist
insurrection in Indochina (Vietnam), and backed a Stalinist dictatorship in
North Korea--all the while denouncing the "warmongers" in the West.
Then, in the summer of 1948, Stalin ordered a blockade of West Berlin,
which was controlled by the Allies; Britain and the U.S. only managed to
retain their hold there via a patchwork airlift from West Germany. But
Western leaders were tiring of Stalin's bullying tactics. By the late 1940s,
sympathy for the Soviet Union was in sharp decline in the United States,
and the Cold War had begun in earnest. Indeed, Stalin faced opposition
even in Eastern Europe: Marshal Tito, the Communist leader of Yugoslavia,
quarreled sharply with Stalin in 1948, and broke from the Soviet bloc.

In 1949 the Soviets finally succeeded in exploding an atomic bomb, and

China fell to the Communists under Mao Zedong. The Marxist revolution--
the mere dream of revolutionaries in Stalin's youth--seemed to finally be
at hand, and that December, Mao attended the impressive celebration of
Stalin's seventieth birthday. The aging man was still dangerous: in 1948,
he had abruptly eliminated Zhdanov and his allies (they were all shot),
and returned Malenkov to favor. Meanwhile, his latent anti-Semitism was
coming to the fore in his old age, and undertook an undeclared campaign
of persecution against the Soviet Union's Jews. Nonetheless, Stalin was
increasingly feeble, and gradually became dependent upon Malenkov,
Beria, and others in day-to-day affairs; his formidable daughter Svetlana
was frequently in attendance on him, although she later said they "had
nothing to say to each other."

(His two sons were disappointments: Vasily, the younger, was a dissolute
disgrace; Yakov had died, disowned by his father, as a German prisoner of
war.) Stalin now took an obsessive interest in films, which he watched
constantly. He became devoted to pseudo-scientific theories as well,
although this was not a new attachment--Marxist claptrap had long
dominated true science in the Soviet Union, especially in the biological
sciences. He also continued in his constant political plottings, and, as
always, saw enemies everywhere.
In 1950, Mao and Stalin signed a Sino-Soviet friendship treaty, although
the two dictators were wary of one another. In March of that year, the
Stalinist leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, came to Moscow. He left
bearing one of Stalin's last poisonous presents to the world--permission to
invade the American-backed South Korea. When the Korean War
threatened to spread, however, Stalin never considered involvement--
indeed, during his last years he blanketed the West with propaganda for
peace. And the propaganda was not wholly ill received: despite all his
crimes, the Soviet Union still possessed admirers in Europe and America- -
a remarkable testament to the seductive lure of Marxism.

As Stalin neared death, his paranoia intensified. There is evidence that

during his last days he was planning another great purge, this one to be
directed against Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, and others. Meanwhile, his
anti-Semitic campaign continued throughout the Soviet Union and the
Eastern bloc, and as 1952 drew to a close, he hatched a plot to eliminate
all Jews from western Russia. This was to begin with the "discovery" of the
so-called "Doctors' Plot": his (Jewish) doctors would be accused of
collaborating with a foreign power and plotting to kill him. From there,
Stalin planned to have leading Jewish Communists "request" resettlement
in the east, a request that would of course be granted. The Doctors' Plot
was "detected" in January of 1953, and a wave of anti-Semitic hysteria
swept the country. But by now Stalin's health was failing rapidly. As late
as February 28, he was able to dine with a group that included Beria,
Malenkov, and Nikita Krushchev, who would ultimately emerge as his
successor. But the next day he suffered a stroke. For three days he
wavered between life and death, before finally passing from this life, in
great pain, on March 5, 1953. It was, for Russia and the world, the end of
an era.

Hitler

After leaving school, he visited Vienna, then returned to Linz,

where he dreamed of becoming an artist. Later, he used the
small allowance he continued to draw to maintain himself in
Vienna. He wished to study art, for which he had some faculties,
but he twice failed to secure entry to the Academy of Fine Arts.
For some years he lived a lonely and isolated life, earning a
precarious livelihood by
painting postcards and advertisements and drifting from one
municipal hostel to another. Hitler already showed traits that
characterized his later life: loneliness and secretiveness, a
bohemian mode of everyday existence, and hatred of
cosmopolitanism and of the multinational character of Vienna.
In 1913 Hitler moved to Munich. Screened for Austrian military
service in February 1914, he was classified as unfit because of
inadequate physical vigour; but when World War I broke out, he
petitioned Bavarian King Louis III to be allowed to serve, and one
day after submitting that request, he was notified that he would
be permitted to join the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry
Regiment. After some eight weeks of training, Hitler
was deployed in October 1914 to Belgium, where he participated
in the First Battle of Ypres. He served throughout the war, was
wounded in October 1916, and was gassed two years later
near Ypres. He was hospitalized when the conflict ended. During
the war, he was continuously in the front line as a headquarters
runner; his bravery in action was rewarded with the Iron Cross,
Second Class, in December 1914, and the Iron Cross, First Class
(a rare decoration for a corporal), in August 1918. He greeted
the war with enthusiasm, as a great relief from the frustration
and aimlessness of civilian life. He found discipline and
comradeship satisfying and was confirmed in his belief in the
heroic virtues of war.
Discharged from the hospital amid the social chaos that
followed Germany’s defeat, Hitler took up political work
in Munich in May–June 1919. As an army political agent, he
joined the small German Workers’ Party in Munich (September
1919). In 1920 he was put in charge of the
party’s propaganda and left the army to devote himself to
improving his position within the party, which in that year was
renamed the National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
(Nazi). Conditions were ripe for the development of such a party.
Resentment at the loss of the war and the severity of the peace
terms added to the economic woes and brought widespread
discontent. This was especially sharp in Bavaria, due to its
traditional separatism and the region’s popular dislike of the
republican government in Berlin. In March 1920 a coup d’état by
a few army officers attempted in vain to establish a right-wing
government.

Munich was a gathering place for dissatisfied former servicemen

and members of the Freikorps, which had been organized in
1918–19 from units of the German army that were unwilling to
return to civilian life, and for political plotters against the
republic. Many of these joined the Nazi Party. Foremost among
them was Ernst Röhm, a staff member of the district army
command, who had joined the German Workers’ Party before
Hitler and who was of great help in furthering Hitler’s rise within
the party. It was he who recruited the “strong arm” squads used
by Hitler to protect party meetings, to attack socialists and
communists, and to exploit violence for the impression of
strength it gave. In 1921 these squads were formally organized
under Röhm into a private party army, the SA (Sturmabteilung).
Röhm was also able to secure protection from the Bavarian
government, which depended on the local army command for the
maintenance of order and which tacitly accepted some of
his terrorist tactics.

Conditions were favourable for the growth of the small party, and
Hitler was sufficiently astute to take full advantage of them.
When he joined the party, he found it ineffective, committed to a
program of nationalist and socialist ideas but uncertain of its
aims and divided in its leadership. He accepted its program but
regarded it as a means to an end. His propaganda and his
personal ambition caused friction with the other leaders of the
party. Hitler countered their attempts to curb him by threatening
resignation, and because the future of the party depended on his
power to organize publicity and to acquire funds, his opponents
relented. In July 1921 he became their leader with almost
unlimited powers. From the first he set out to create a mass
movement, whose mystique and power would be sufficient to
bind its members in loyalty to him. He engaged in unrelenting
propaganda through the party newspaper, the Völkischer
Beobachter (“Popular Observer,” acquired in 1920), and through
meetings whose audiences soon grew from a handful to
thousands. With his charismatic personality
and dynamic leadership, he attracted a devoted cadre of Nazi
leaders, men whose names today live in infamy—Johann Dietrich
Eckart (who acted as a mentor for Hitler), Alfred
Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Julius Streicher.

The climax of this rapid growth of the Nazi Party in Bavaria came
in an attempt to seize power in the Munich (Beer Hall) Putsch of
November 1923, when Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff tried
to take advantage of the prevailing confusion and opposition to
the Weimar Republic to force the leaders of the Bavarian
government and the local army commander to proclaim a
national revolution.

In the melee that resulted, the police and the army fired at the
advancing marchers, killing a few of them. Hitler was injured,
and four policemen were killed. Placed on trial for treason, he
characteristically took advantage of the immense publicity
afforded to him. He also drew a vital lesson from the Putsch—
that the movement must achieve power by legal means. He was
sentenced to prison for five years but served only nine months,
and those in relative comfort at Landsberg castle. Hitler used the
time to dictate the first volume of Mein Kampf, his political
autobiography as well as a compendium of his multitudinous
ideas.

Hitler’s ideas included inequality among races, nations, and

individuals as part of an unchangeable natural order that exalted
the “Aryan race” as the creative element of mankind. According
to Hitler, the natural unit of mankind was the Volk (“the people”),
of which the German people was the greatest. Moreover, he
believed that the state existed to serve the Volk—a mission that
to him the Weimar German Republic betrayed. All morality and
truth were judged by this criterion: whether it was in accordance
with the interest and preservation of the Volk. Parliamentary
democratic government stood doubly condemned. It assumed the
equality of individuals that for Hitler did not exist and supposed
that what was in the interests of the Volk could be decided by
parliamentary procedures. Instead, Hitler argued that the unity
of the Volk would find its incarnation in the Führer, endowed
with perfect authority. Below the Führer the party was drawn
from the Volk and was in turn its safeguard.

The greatest enemy of Nazism was not, in Hitler’s view, liberal

democracy in Germany, which was already on the verge of
collapse. It was the rival Weltanschauung, Marxism (which for
him embraced social democracy as well as communism), with its
insistence on internationalism and economic conflict. Beyond
Marxism he believed the greatest enemy of all to be the Jew, who
was for Hitler the incarnation of evil. There is debate among
historians as to when anti-Semitism became Hitler’s deepest and
strongest conviction. As early as 1919 he wrote, “Rational anti-
Semitism must lead to systematic legal opposition. Its final
objective must be the removal of the Jews altogether.” In Mein
Kampf, he described the Jew as the “destroyer of culture,” “a
parasite within the nation,” and “a menace.”

During Hitler’s absence in prison, the Nazi Party languished as

the result of internal dissension. After his release, Hitler faced
difficulties that had not existed before 1923.
Economic stability had been achieved by a currency reform and
the Dawes Plan had scaled back Germany’s World War
I reparations. The republic seemed to have become more
respectable. Hitler was forbidden to make speeches, first
in Bavaria, then in many other German states (these prohibitions
remained in force until 1927–28). Nevertheless, the party grew
slowly in numbers, and in 1926 Hitler successfully established
his position within it against Gregor Strasser, whose followers
were primarily in northern Germany.

The advent of the Depression in 1929, however, led to a new

period of political instability. In 1930 Hitler made an alliance
with the Nationalist Alfred Hugenberg in a campaign against
the Young Plan, a second renegotiation of Germany’s
war reparation payments. With the help of
Hugenberg’s newspapers, Hitler was able for the first time to
reach a nationwide audience. The alliance also enabled him to
seek support from many of the magnates of business and
industry who controlled political funds and were anxious to use
them to establish a strong right-wing, antisocialist government.

The subsidies Hitler received from the industrialists placed his

party on a secure financial footing and enabled him to make
effective his emotional appeal to the lower middle class and the
unemployed, based on the proclamation of his faith that Germany
would awaken from its sufferings to reassert its natural
greatness. Hitler’s dealings with Hugenberg and the
industrialists exemplify his skill in using those who sought to use
him. But his most important achievement was the establishment
of a truly national party (with its voters and followers drawn from
different classes and religious groups), unique in Germany at the
time.

Unremitting propaganda, set against the failure of the

government to improve conditions during the Depression,
produced a steadily mounting electoral strength for the Nazis.
The party became the second largest in the country, rising from
2.6 percent of the vote in the national election of 1928 to more
than 18 percent in September 1930. In 1932 Hitler
opposed Hindenburg in the presidential election, capturing 36.8
percent of the votes on the second ballot. Finding himself in a
strong position by virtue of his unprecedented mass following, he
entered into a series of intrigues with conservatives such
as Franz von Papen, Otto Meissner, and President Hindenburg’s
son, Oskar. The fear of communism and the rejection of the
Social Democrats bound them together. In spite of a decline in
the Nazi Party’s votes in November 1932, Hitler insisted that the
chancellorship was the only office he would accept. On January
30, 1933, Hindenburg offered him the chancellorship of
Germany. His cabinet included few Nazis at that point.

PERSONAL LIFE

Hitler’s personal life had grown more relaxed and stable with the
added comfort that accompanied political success. After his
release from prison, he often went to live on the Obersalzberg,
near Berchtesgaden. His income at this time was derived from
party funds and from writing for nationalist newspapers. He was
largely indifferent to clothes and food but did not eat meat and
gave up drinking beer (and all other alcohols). His rather
irregular working schedule prevailed. He usually rose late,
sometimes dawdled at his desk, and retired late at night.
At Berchtesgaden, his half sister Angela Raubal and her two
daughters accompanied him. Hitler became devoted to one of
them, Geli, and it seems that his possessive jealousy drove her
to suicide in September 1931. For weeks Hitler was inconsolable.
Some time later Eva Braun, a shop assistant from Munich,
became his mistress. Hitler rarely allowed her to appear in
public with him. He would not consider marriage on the grounds
that it would hamper his career. Braun was a simple young
woman with few intellectual gifts. Her great virtue in Hitler’s
eyes was her unquestioning loyalty, and in recognition of this he
legally married her at the end of his life.
DICTATORSHIP
Once in power, Hitler established an absolute dictatorship. He
secured the president’s assent for new elections. The Reichstag
fire, on the night of February 27, 1933 (apparently the work of a
Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe), provided an excuse
for a decree overriding all guarantees of freedom and for an
intensified campaign of violence. In these conditions, when the
elections were held (March 5), the Nazis polled 43.9 percent of
the votes. On March 21 the Reichstag assembled in the Potsdam
Garrison Church to demonstrate the unity of National
Socialism with the old conservative Germany, represented
by Hindenburg.
Two days later the Enabling Bill, giving full powers to Hitler, was
passed in the Reichstag by the combined votes of Nazi,
Nationalist, and Centre party deputies (March 23, 1933). Less
than three months later all non-Nazi parties, organizations, and
labor unions ceased to exist. The disappearance of the Catholic
Centre Party was followed by a German Concordat with the
Vatican in July.
Hitler had no desire to spark a radical revolution. Conservative
“ideas” were still necessary if he was to succeed to the
presidency and retain the support of the army; moreover, he did
not intend to expropriate the leaders of industry, provided they
served the interests of the Nazi state. Ernst Röhm, however, was
a protagonist of the “continuing revolution”; he was also, as head
of the SA, distrusted by the army. Hitler tried first to secure
Röhm’s support for his policies by persuasion. Hermann
Göring and Heinrich Himmler were eager to remove Röhm, but
Hitler hesitated until the last moment. finally, on June 29, 1934,
he reached his decision. On the “Night of the Long Knives,”
Röhm and his lieutenant Edmund Heines were executed without
trial, along with Gregor Strasser, Kurt von Schleicher, and
others.
The army leaders, satisfied at seeing the SA broken up, approved
Hitler’s actions. When Hindenburg died on August 2, the army
leaders, together with Papen, assented to the merging of the
chancellorship and the presidency—with which went the
supreme command of the armed forces of the Reich. Now officers
and men took an oath of allegiance to Hitler personally.
Economic recovery and a fast reduction
in unemployment (coincident with world recovery, but for which
Hitler took credit) made the regime increasingly popular, and a
combination of success and police terror brought the support of
90 percent of the voters in a plebiscite.
Hitler devoted little attention to the organization and running of
the domestic affairs of the Nazi state. Responsible for the broad
lines of policy, as well as for the system of terror that upheld the
state, he left detailed administration to his subordinates. Each of
these exercised arbitrary power in his own sphere; but by
deliberately creating offices and organizations with overlapping
authority, Hitler effectively prevented any one of these particular
realms from ever becoming sufficiently strong to challenge his
own absolute authority.
Foreign policy claimed his greater interest. As he had made clear
in Mein Kampf, the reunion of the German peoples was his
overriding ambition. Beyond that, the natural field of expansion
lay eastward, in Poland, the Ukraine, and the U.S.S.R.—
expansion that would necessarily involve renewal of Germany’s
historic conflict with the Slavic peoples, who would
be subordinate in the new order to the Teutonic master race. He
saw fascist Italy as his natural ally in this crusade. Britain was a
possible ally, provided that it would abandon its traditional policy
of maintaining the balance of power in Europe and limit itself to
its interests overseas. In the west France remained the natural
enemy of Germany and must, therefore, be cowed or subdued to
make expansion eastward possible.
Before such expansion was possible, it was necessary to remove
the restrictions placed on Germany at the end of World War I by
the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler used all the arts of propaganda to
allay the suspicions of the other powers. He posed as the
champion of Europe against the scourge of Bolshevism and
insisted that he was a man of peace who wished only to remove
the inequalities of the Versailles Treaty. He withdrew from
the Disarmament Conference and from the League of
Nations (October 1933), and he signed a nonaggression treaty
with Poland (January 1934).
Every repudiation of the treaty was followed by an offer to
negotiate a fresh agreement and insistence on the limited nature
of Germany’s ambitions. Only once did the Nazis overreach
themselves: when Austrian Nazis, with the connivance of German
organizations, murdered Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss of Austria
and attempted a revolt (July 1934). The attempt failed, and Hitler
disclaimed all responsibility. In January 1935 a plebiscite in
the Saarland, with a more than 90 percent majority, returned
that territory to Germany. In March of the same year, Hitler
introduced conscription.
Although this action provoked protests from Britain, France, and
Italy, the opposition was restrained, and Hitler’s
peace diplomacy was sufficiently successful to persuade the
British to negotiate a naval treaty (June 1935) recognizing
Germany’s right to a considerable navy. His greatest stroke came
in March 1936, when he used the excuse of a pact between
France and the Soviet Union to march into the
demilitarized Rhineland—a decision that he took against the
advice of many generals. Meanwhile the alliance with
Italy, foreseen in Mein Kampf, rapidly became a reality as a
result of the sanctions imposed by Britain and France against
Italy during the Ethiopian war. In October 1936, a Rome–
Berlin axis was proclaimed by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini;
shortly afterward came the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan; and
a year later all three countries joined in a pact. Although on
paper France had a number of allies in Europe, while Germany
had none, Hitler’s Third Reich had become the principal
European power.
In November 1937, at a secret meeting of his military leaders,
Hitler outlined his plans for future conquest (beginning
with Austria and Czechoslovakia). In January 1938
he dispensed with the services of those who were not
wholehearted in their acceptance of Nazi dynamism—Hjalmar
Schacht, who was concerned with the German economy; Werner
von Fritsch, a representative of the caution of professional
soldiers; and Konstantin von Neurath, Hindenburg’s appointment
at the foreign office. In February Hitler invited the
Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg,
to Berchtesgaden and forced him to sign an agreement including
Austrian Nazis within the Vienna government. When
Schuschnigg attempted to resist, announcing a plebiscite about
Austrian independence, Hitler immediately ordered the invasion
of Austria by German troops. The enthusiastic reception that
Hitler received convinced him to settle the future of Austria by
outright annexation (Anschluss). He returned in triumph to
Vienna, the scene of his youthful humiliations and hardships. No
resistance was encountered from Britain and France. Hitler had
taken special care to secure the support of Italy; as this was
forthcoming he proclaimed his undying gratitude to Mussolini.
In spite of his assurances that Anschluss would not affect
Germany’s relations with Czechoslovakia, Hitler proceeded at
once with his plans against that country. Konrad Henlein, leader
of the German minority in Czechoslovakia, was instructed to
agitate for impossible demands on the part of
the Sudetenland Germans, thereby enabling Hitler to move
ahead on the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Britain’s
and France’s willingness to accept the cession of the
Sudetenland areas to Germany presented Hitler with the choice
between substantial gains by peaceful agreement or by a
spectacular war against Czechoslovakia. The intervention by
Mussolini and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain appear
to have been decisive. Hitler accepted the Munich Agreement on
September 30.
He also declared that these were his last territorial demands in
Europe.

Only a few months later, he proceeded to occupy the rest of

Czechoslovakia. On March 15, 1939, he marched
into Prague declaring that the rest of “Czechia” would become a
German protectorate. A few days later (March 23) the Lithuanian
government was forced to cede Memel (Klaipeda), next to the
northern frontier of East Prussia, to Germany.
Immediately Hitler turned on Poland. Confronted by the Polish
nation and its leaders, whose resolution to resist him was
strengthened by a guarantee from Britain and France, Hitler
confirmed his alliance with Italy (the “Pact of Steel,” May 1939).
Moreover, on August 23, just within the deadline set for an
attack on Poland, he signed a nonaggression pact with Joseph
Stalin’s Soviet Union—the greatest diplomatic bombshell in
centuries. Hitler still disclaimed any quarrel with Britain, but to
no avail; the German invasion of Poland (September 1) was
followed two days later by a British and French declaration of
war on Germany.

In his foreign policy, Hitler combined opportunism and clever

timing. He showed astonishing skill in judging the mood of the
democratic leaders and exploiting their weaknesses—in spite of
the fact that he had scarcely set foot outside Austria and
Germany and spoke no foreign language. Up to this point every
move had been successful. Even his anxiety over British and
French entry into the war was dispelled by the rapid success of
the campaign in Poland. He could, he thought, rely on his talents
during the war as he relied on them before.

WW2
Germany’s war strategy was assumed by Hitler from the first.
When the successful campaign against Poland failed to produce
the desired peace accord with Britain, he ordered the army to
prepare for an immediate offensive in the west.
Bad weather made some of his reluctant generals postpone the
western offensive. This in turn led to two major changes in
planning. The first was Hitler’s order to forestall an eventual
British presence in Norway by occupying
that country and Denmark in April 1940. Hitler took a close
personal interest in this daring operation. From this time onward
his intervention in the detail of military operations grew steadily
greater.
The second was Hitler’s important adoption of General Erich von
Manstein’s plan for an attack through the Ardennes (which
began May 10) instead of farther north. This was a brilliant and
startling success. The German armies reached the Channel ports
(which they had been unable to reach during World War I) in 10
days. Holland surrendered after 4 days and Belgium after 16
days. Hitler held back General Gerd von Rundstedt’s tanks south
of Dunkirk, thus enabling the British to evacuate most of their
army, but the western campaign as a whole was amazingly
successful. On June 10 Italy entered the war on the side of
Germany. On June 22 Hitler signed a triumphant armistice with
the French on the site of the Armistice of 1918.
Hitler hoped that the British would negotiate an armistice. When
this did not happen, he proceeded to plan the invasion of Britain,
together with the elimination of British air power. At the same
time preparations were begun for the invasion of the Soviet
Union, which in Hitler’s view was Britain’s last hope for
a bulwark against German control of the continent. Then
Mussolini invaded Greece, where the failures of the Italian
armies made it necessary for German forces to come to their aid
in the Balkans and North Africa. Hitler’s plans were further
disrupted by a coup d’état in Yugoslavia in March 1941,
overthrowing the government that had made an agreement with
Germany. Hitler immediately ordered his armies to subdue
Yugoslavia. The campaigns in the Mediterranean theatre,
although successful, were limited, compared to the invasion
of Russia. Hitler would spare few forces from Operation
Barbarossa, the planned invasion of the Soviet Union.
The attack against the U.S.S.R. was launched on June 22, 1941.
The German army advanced swiftly into the Soviet
Union, corralling almost three million Russian prisoners, but it
failed to destroy its Russian opponent. Hitler became
overbearing in his relations with his generals. He disagreed with
them about the object of the main attack, and he wasted time
and strength by failing to concentrate on a single objective. In
December 1941, a few miles before Moscow, a Russian
counteroffensive finally made it clear that Hitler’s hopes of a
single campaign could not be realized.
On December 7, the next day, the Japanese attacked U.S. forces
at Pearl Harbor. Hitler’s alliance with Japan forced him to
declare war on the United States. From this moment on his
entire strategy changed. He hoped and tried (like
his idol Frederick II the Great) to break what he deemed was the
unnatural coalition of his opponents by forcing one or the other
of them to make peace. (In the end, the “unnatural” coalition
between Stalin and Winston Churchill and Franklin D.
Roosevelt did break up, but too late for Hitler.) He also ordered
the reorganization of the German economy on a full wartime
basis.
Meanwhile, Himmler prepared the ground for a “new order”
in Europe. From 1933 to 1939 and in some instances even during
the first years of the war, Hitler’s purpose was to expel
the Jews from the Greater German Reich. In 1941 this policy
changed from expulsion to extermination. The concentration
camps created under the Nazi regime were thereby expanded to
include extermination camps, such as Auschwitz, and mobile
extermination squads, the Einsatzgruppen. Although Catholics,
Poles, homosexuals, Roma (Gypsies), and the handicapped were
targeted for persecution, if not outright extermination, the Jews
of Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union were by far the most
numerous among the victims; in German-occupied Europe some
six million Jews were killed during the war. The sufferings of
other peoples were only less when measured in their numbers
killed.
At the end of 1942, defeat at El-Alamein and at Stalingrad and
the American landing in French North Africa brought the turning
point in the war, and Hitler’s character and way of life began to
change. Directing operations from his headquarters in the east,
he refused to visit bombed cities or to allow some withdrawals,
and he became increasingly dependent on his physician, Theodor
Morell, and on the large amounts and varieties of medicines he
ingested. Yet Hitler had not lost the power to react vigorously in
the face of misfortune. After the arrest of Mussolini in July 1943
and the Italian armistice, he not only directed the occupation of
all important positions held by the Italian army but also ordered
the rescue of Mussolini, with the intention that he should head a
new fascist government. On the eastern front, however, there
was less and less possibility of holding up the advance. Relations
with his army commanders grew strained, the more so with the
growing importance given to the SS (Schutzstaffel) divisions.
Meanwhile, the general failure of the U-boat campaign and the
bombing of Germany made chances of German victory very
unlikely.
Desperate officers and anti-Nazi civilians became ready to
remove Hitler and negotiate a peace. Several attempts on
Hitler’s life were planned in 1943–44; the most nearly successful
was made on July 20, 1944, when Colonel Claus von
Stauffenberg exploded a bomb at a conference being held at
Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia. But Hitler escaped with
superficial injuries, and, with few exceptions, those implicated in
the plot were executed. The reduction of the army’s
independence was now made complete; National Socialist
political officers were appointed to all military headquarters.
Thereafter, Hitler was increasingly ill; but he did not relax or lose
control, and he continued to exercise an almost hypnotic power
over his close subordinates, none of whom wielded any
independent authority. The Allied invasion of Normandy (June 6,
1944) marked the beginning of the end. Within a few months,
eight European capitals
(Rome, Paris, Brussels, Bucharest, Sofia, Athens, Belgrade, Helsi
nki) were liberated by the Allies or surrendered to them. In
December 1944 Hitler moved his headquarters to the west to
direct an offensive in the Ardennes aimed at splitting the
American and the British armies. When this failed, his hopes for
victory became ever more visionary, based on the use of
new weapons (German rockets had been fired on London since
June 1944) or on the breakup of the Allied Powers.
After January 1945 Hitler never left the Chancellery in Berlin or
its bunker, abandoning a plan to lead a final resistance in the
south as the Soviet forces closed in on Berlin. In a state of
extreme nervous exhaustion, he at last accepted the inevitability
of defeat and thereupon prepared to take his own life, leaving to
its fate the country over which he had taken absolute command.
Before this, two further acts remained. At midnight on April 28–
29 he married Eva Braun. Immediately afterward he dictated his
political testament, justifying his career and appointing
Admiral Karl Dönitz as head of the state and Joseph
Goebbels as chancellor.
On April 30 he said farewell to Goebbels and the few others
remaining, then retired to his suite and shot himself. His wife
took poison. In accordance with his instructions, their bodies
were burned.
Hitler’s success was due to the susceptibility of postwar
Germany to his unique talents as a national leader. His rise to
power was not inevitable; yet there was no one who equalled his
ability to exploit and shape events to his own ends. The power
that he wielded was unprecedented, both in its scope and in the
technical resources at its command. His ideas and purposes were
accepted in whole or in part by millions of people, especially in
Germany but also elsewhere. By the time he was defeated, he
had destroyed most of what was left of old Europe, while the
German people had to face what they would later call “Year
Zero,” 1945.

GELI RAUBAL

Geli Raubal, the daughter of Leo Raubal and Angela Raubal, was born in Linz on 4th June,
1908. When Adolf Hitler rented a house in Obersalzberg he asked his half-sister, Angela
Raubal, now a widow, to be his housekeeper. She agreed and in August 1928 brought Geli
with her to stay with Hitler. The 39 year-old Hitler soon fell in love with her and became her
constant companion at meetings, restaurants, conferences and on walks in the mountains.
In 1929 Hitler took an apartment in Munich's Prinzregentenstrasse and the Raubal family
moved in with him. (1)

Geli became a close friend of Henriette Hoffmann, the young daughter of Heinrich
Hoffmann, Hitler's official photographer. Hitler told Otto Wagener: "I can sit next to young
women who leave me completely cold. I feel nothing, or they actually irritate me. But a girl
like the little Hoffmann or Geli (Raubal) - with them I become cheerful and bright, and if I
have listened for an hour to their perhaps silly chatter - or I have only to sit next to them -
then I am free of all weariness and listlessness I can go back to work refreshed." (2)
Hitler once commented: "A girl of eighteen to twenty is as malleable as wax. It should be
possible for a man, whoever the chosen woman may be, to stamp his own imprint on her.
That's all the woman asks for." Joachim Fest, the author of Hitler (1973), wrote that Hitler
became obsessed with Geli: "The affection Hitler felt for this pretty, superficial niece soon
developed into a passionate relationship hopelessly burdened by his intolerance, his
romantic ideal of womanhood and avuncular scruples." (3)

Patrick Hitler, the son of Adolf's brother, Alois Hitler, met her during this period: "Geli looks
more like a child than a girl. You couldn't call her pretty exactly, but she had great natural
charm. She usually went without a hat and wore very plain clothes, pleated skirts and white
blouses. No jewellery except a gold swastika given to her by Uncle Adolf, whom she called
Uncle Alf." (4)

Hitler became infatuated with Geli Raubal and rumours soon spread that he was having an
affair with his young niece. Hitler told Heinrich Hoffman: "You know, Hoffmann, I'm so
concerned about Geli's future that I feel I have to watch over her. I love Geli and could
marry her. Good! But you know what my viewpoint is. I want to remain single. So I retain
the right to exert an influence on her circle of friends until such a time as she finds the right
man. What Geli sees as compulsion is simply prudence. I want to stop her from falling into
the hands of someone unsuitable." (5)

Adolf Hitler also took her with him to meetings. Baldur von Schirach commented: "The girl
at Hitler's side was of medium size, well developed, had dark, rather wavy hair, and lively
brown eyes. A flush of embarrassment reddened the round face as she entered the room
with him, and sensed the surprise caused by his appearance. I too stared at her for a long
time, not because she was pretty to look at but because it was simply astonishing to see a
young girl at Hitler's side when he appeared at a large gathering of people. He chatted
animatedly to her, patted her hand and scarcely paused long enough for her to say
anything. Punctually at eleven o'clock he stood up to leave the party with Geli, who had
gradually become more animated. I had the impression Geli would have liked to stay
longer." (6)

The couple lived together for over two years. The relationship with Geli was stormy and
they began to accuse each other of being unfaithful. Geli was particularly concerned
about Eva Braun, a seventeen-year-old girl who Hitler took for rides in his Mercedes
car. Henriette Hoffman knew Eva, who worked in her father's studio. She recalled that "Eva
had pale blonde hair, cut short, blue eyes, and, although she had been educated in a
Catholic convent, she had learnt feminine wiles - a certain look, and swaying hips when she
walked, which made men turn their heads." According to his biographer, Ian Kershaw, "for
the first time in his life (if we leave out his mother out of consideration) he became
emotionally dependent on a woman." (7)

Ernst Hanfstaengel, who had a close relationship with Hitler at the time suggested that Geli
was willing "to submit to his peculiar tastes" and was the "one woman in his life who went
some way towards curing his impotence and half making a man out of him." He went on to
say "that the services she was prepared to render had the effect of making him behave like
a man in love... he hovered at her elbow with a moon-calf look in his eyes in a very plausible
imitation of adolescent infatuation." (8)

Anni Winter, Hitler's housekeeper, claimed: "Geli loved Hitler. She was always running after
him. Naturally, she wanted to be become Frau Hitler... He was highly eligible... but she
flirted with everybody; she was not a serious girl." Emil Maurice commented: "He liked to
show her off everywhere; he was proud of being seen in the company of such an attractive
girl. He was convinced that in this way he impressed his comrades in the party, whose
wives or girlfriends nearly all looked like washerwomen." (9)

Baldur von Schirach wrote in his autobiography: "He (Hitler) followed her into millinery
shops and watched patiently while she tried on all the hats and then decided on a beret. He
sniffed at the sophisticated French perfumes she enquired about in a shop on the
Theatinerstrasse, and if she didn't find what she wanted in a shop, he trotted after her...
like a patient lamb. She exercised the sweet tyranny of youth, and he liked it, he was more
cheerful, happier person." (10)
Geli Raubal, the daughter of Leo Raubal and Angela Raubal, was born in Linz on 4th June,
1908. When Adolf Hitler rented a house in Obersalzberg he asked his half-sister, Angela
Raubal, now a widow, to be his housekeeper. She agreed and in August 1928 brought Geli
with her to stay with Hitler. The 39 year-old Hitler soon fell in love with her and became her
constant companion at meetings, restaurants, conferences and on walks in the mountains.
In 1929 Hitler took an apartment in Munich's Prinzregentenstrasse and the Raubal family
moved in with him. (1)

Geli became a close friend of Henriette Hoffmann, the young daughter of Heinrich
Hoffmann, Hitler's official photographer. Hitler told Otto Wagener: "I can sit next to young
women who leave me completely cold. I feel nothing, or they actually irritate me. But a girl
like the little Hoffmann or Geli (Raubal) - with them I become cheerful and bright, and if I
have listened for an hour to their perhaps silly chatter - or I have only to sit next to them -
then I am free of all weariness and listlessness I can go back to work refreshed." (2)

Hitler once commented: "A girl of eighteen to twenty is as malleable as wax. It should be
possible for a man, whoever the chosen woman may be, to stamp his own imprint on her.
That's all the woman asks for." Joachim Fest, the author of Hitler (1973), wrote that Hitler
became obsessed with Geli: "The affection Hitler felt for this pretty, superficial niece soon
developed into a passionate relationship hopelessly burdened by his intolerance, his
romantic ideal of womanhood and avuncular scruples." (3)

Patrick Hitler, the son of Adolf's brother, Alois Hitler, met her during this period: "Geli looks
more like a child than a girl. You couldn't call her pretty exactly, but she had great natural
charm. She usually went without a hat and wore very plain clothes, pleated skirts and white
blouses. No jewellery except a gold swastika given to her by Uncle Adolf, whom she called
Uncle Alf." (4)

Geli Raubal & Adolf Hitler

Hitler became infatuated with Geli Raubal and rumours soon spread that he was having an
affair with his young niece. Hitler told Heinrich Hoffman: "You know, Hoffmann, I'm so
concerned about Geli's future that I feel I have to watch over her. I love Geli and could
marry her. Good! But you know what my viewpoint is. I want to remain single. So I retain
the right to exert an influence on her circle of friends until such a time as she finds the right
man. What Geli sees as compulsion is simply prudence. I want to stop her from falling into
the hands of someone unsuitable." (5)

Adolf Hitler also took her with him to meetings. Baldur von Schirach commented: "The girl
at Hitler's side was of medium size, well developed, had dark, rather wavy hair, and lively
brown eyes. A flush of embarrassment reddened the round face as she entered the room
with him, and sensed the surprise caused by his appearance. I too stared at her for a long
time, not because she was pretty to look at but because it was simply astonishing to see a
young girl at Hitler's side when he appeared at a large gathering of people. He chatted
animatedly to her, patted her hand and scarcely paused long enough for her to say
anything. Punctually at eleven o'clock he stood up to leave the party with Geli, who had
gradually become more animated. I had the impression Geli would have liked to stay
longer." (6)

Adolf Hitler with Geli and Elfriede Raubal

The couple lived together for over two years. The relationship with Geli was stormy and
they began to accuse each other of being unfaithful. Geli was particularly concerned
about Eva Braun, a seventeen-year-old girl who Hitler took for rides in his Mercedes
car. Henriette Hoffman knew Eva, who worked in her father's studio. She recalled that "Eva
had pale blonde hair, cut short, blue eyes, and, although she had been educated in a
Catholic convent, she had learnt feminine wiles - a certain look, and swaying hips when she
walked, which made men turn their heads." According to his biographer, Ian Kershaw, "for
the first time in his life (if we leave out his mother out of consideration) he became
emotionally dependent on a woman." (7)

Ernst Hanfstaengel, who had a close relationship with Hitler at the time suggested that Geli
was willing "to submit to his peculiar tastes" and was the "one woman in his life who went
some way towards curing his impotence and half making a man out of him." He went on to
say "that the services she was prepared to render had the effect of making him behave like
a man in love... he hovered at her elbow with a moon-calf look in his eyes in a very plausible
imitation of adolescent infatuation." (8)

Adolf Hitler and his half-sister, Angela Raubal

Anni Winter, Hitler's housekeeper, claimed: "Geli loved Hitler. She was always running after
him. Naturally, she wanted to be become Frau Hitler... He was highly eligible... but she
flirted with everybody; she was not a serious girl." Emil Maurice commented: "He liked to
show her off everywhere; he was proud of being seen in the company of such an attractive
girl. He was convinced that in this way he impressed his comrades in the party, whose
wives or girlfriends nearly all looked like washerwomen." (9)

Baldur von Schirach wrote in his autobiography: "He (Hitler) followed her into millinery
shops and watched patiently while she tried on all the hats and then decided on a beret. He
sniffed at the sophisticated French perfumes she enquired about in a shop on the
Theatinerstrasse, and if she didn't find what she wanted in a shop, he trotted after her...
like a patient lamb. She exercised the sweet tyranny of youth, and he liked it, he was more
cheerful, happier person." (10)

Geli Raubal

Adolf Hitler continued to live with Geli Raubal. However, Geli's friend, Henriette Hoffmann,
claims that Geli grew more and more indifferent to him while he grew more and more
passionate about her. Geli began seeing other men. Wilhelm Stocker, an SA officer, was
often on guard duty outside Hitler's Munich flat, later told the author of Eva and
Adolf (1974): "Many times when Hitler was away for several days at a political rally or
tending to party matters in Berlin or elsewhere, Geli would associate with other men. I liked
the girl myself so I never told anyone what she did or where she went on these free nights.
Hitler would have been furious if he had known that she was out with such men as a violin
player from Augsburg or a ski instructor from Innsbruck." (11)

MUSSOLINI
During a period of freedom in 1909, he fell in love with 16-year-
old Rachele Guidi, the younger of the two daughters of his
father’s widowed mistress; she went to live with him in a damp,
cramped apartment in Forlì and later married him. Soon after the
marriage, Mussolini was imprisoned for the fifth time; but by
then Comrade Mussolini had become recognized as one of the
most gifted and dangerous of Italy’s younger socialists. After
writing in a wide variety of socialist papers, he founded a
newspaper of his own, La Lotta di Classe (“The Class Struggle”).
So successful was this paper that in 1912 he was appointed
editor of the official Socialist newspaper, Avanti! (“Forward!”),
whose circulation he soon doubled; and as its antimilitarist,
antinationalist, and anti-imperialist editor, he thunderously
opposed Italy’s intervention in World War I.
Soon, however, he changed his mind about intervention. Swayed
by Karl Marx’s aphorism that social revolution usually follows
war and persuaded that “the defeat of France would be a
deathblow to liberty in Europe,” he began writing articles and
making speeches as violently in favour of war as those in which
he previously had condemned it. He resigned from Avanti! and
was expelled from the Socialist Party. Financed by the French
government and Italian industrialists, both of whom favoured
war against Austria, he assumed the editorship of Il Popolo
d’Italia (“The People of Italy”), in which he unequivocally stated
his new philosophy: “From today onward we are all Italians and
nothing but Italians. Now that steel has met steel, one single cry
comes from our hearts—Viva l’Italia! [Long live Italy!]” It was the
birth cry of fascism. Mussolini went to fight in the war.
RISE

Wounded while serving with the bersaglieri (a corps of

sharpshooters), he returned home a convinced antisocialist and a
man with a sense of destiny. As early as February 1918, he
advocated the emergence of a dictator—“a man who is ruthless
and energetic enough to make a clean sweep”—to confront
the economic and political crisis then gripping Italy. Three
months later, in a widely reported speech in Bologna, he hinted
that he himself might prove to be such a man. The following year
the nucleus of a party prepared to support his ambitious idea
was formed in Milan. In an office in Piazza San Sepolcro, about
200 assorted republicans, anarchists, syndicalists, discontented
socialists, restless revolutionaries, and discharged soldiers met
to discuss the establishment of a new force in Italian politics.
Mussolini called this force the fasci di combattimento (“fighting
bands”), groups of fighters bound together by ties as close as
those that secured the fasces of the lictors—the symbols of
ancient Roman authority. So fascism was created and its symbol
devised.
At rallies—surrounded by supporters wearing black shirts—
Mussolini caught the imagination of the crowds. His physique
was impressive, and his style of oratory, staccato and repetitive,
was superb. His attitudes were highly theatrical, his opinions
were contradictory, his facts were often wrong, and his attacks
were frequently malicious and misdirected; but his words were
so dramatic, his metaphors so apt and striking, his vigorous,
repetitive gestures so extraordinarily effective, that he rarely
failed to impose his mood.
Fascist squads, militias inspired by Mussolini but often created
by local leaders, swept through the countryside of the Po Valley
and the Puglian plains, rounded up Socialists, burned down
union and party offices, and terrorized the local population.
Hundreds of radicals were humiliated, beaten, or killed. In late
1920, the Blackshirt squads, often with the direct help of
landowners, began to attack local government institutions and
prevent left-wing administrations from taking power. Mussolini
encouraged the squads—although he soon tried to control them
—and organized similar raids in and around Milan. By late 1921,
the Fascists controlled large parts of Italy, and the left, in part
because of its failures during the postwar years, had all but
collapsed.
The government, dominated by middle-class Liberals, did little to
combat this lawlessness, both through weak political will and a
desire to see the mainly working-class left defeated. As the
Fascist movement built a broad base of support around the
powerful ideas of nationalism and anti-Bolshevism, Mussolini
began planning to seize power at the national level.
In the summer of 1922, Mussolini’s opportunity presented itself.
The remnants of the trade-union movement called a general
strike. Mussolini declared that unless the government prevented
the strike, the Fascists would. Fascist volunteers, in fact, helped
to defeat the strike and thus advanced the Fascist claim to
power. At a gathering of 40,000 Fascists in Naples on October
24, Mussolini threatened, “Either the government will be given
to us, or we will seize it by marching on Rome.” Responding to
his oratory the assembled Fascists excitedly took up the cry,
shouting in unison “Roma! Roma! Roma!” All appeared eager to
march.
Later that day, Mussolini and other leading Fascists decided that
four days later the Fascist militia would advance on Rome in
converging columns led by four leading party members later to
be known as the Quadrumviri. Mussolini himself was not one of
the four.
He was still hoping for a political compromise, and he refused to
move before King Victor Emmanuel III summoned him in writing.
Meanwhile, all over Italy the Fascists prepared for action, and
the March on Rome began. Although it was far less orderly than
Fascist propaganda later suggested, it was sufficiently
threatening to bring down the government. And the king,
prepared to accept the Fascist alternative, dispatched the
telegram for which Mussolini had been waiting.
DICTATORSHIP
Mussolini’s obvious pride in his achievement at becoming
(October 31, 1922) the youngest prime minister in Italian history
was not misplaced. He had certainly been aided by a favourable
combination of circumstances, both political and economic; but
his remarkable and sudden success also owed something to his
own personality, to native instinct and shrewd calculation,
to astute opportunism, and to his unique gifts as an agitator.
Anxious to demonstrate that he was not merely the leader of
fascism but also the head of a united Italy, he presented to the
king a list of ministers, a majority of whom were not members of
his party. He made it clear, however, that he intended to govern
authoritatively. He obtained full dictatorial powers for a year;
and in that year he pushed through a law that enabled the
Fascists to cement a majority in the parliament. The elections in
1924, though undoubtedly fraudulent, secured his personal
power.
Many Italians, especially among the middle class, welcomed his
authority. They were tired of strikes and riots, responsive to
the flamboyant techniques and medieval trappings of fascism,
and ready to submit to dictatorship, provided the national
economy was stabilized and their country restored to its dignity.
Mussolini seemed to them the one man capable of bringing order
out of chaos. Soon a kind of order had been restored, and the
Fascists inaugurated ambitious programs of public works. The
costs of this order were, however, enormous. Italy’s fragile
democratic system was abolished in favour of a one-party state.
Opposition parties, trade unions, and the free press were
outlawed. Free speech was crushed. A network of spies and
secret policemen watched over the population. This repression
hit moderate Liberals and Catholics as well as Socialists. In 1924
Mussolini’s henchmen kidnapped and murdered the Socialist
deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who had become one of fascism’s
most effective critics in parliament. The Matteotti crisis shook
Mussolini, but he managed to maintain his hold on power.
Mussolini was hailed as a genius and a superman by public
figures worldwide. His achievements were considered little less
than miraculous. He had transformed and reinvigorated his
divided and demoralized country; he had carried out his social
reforms and public works without losing the support of the
industrialists and landowners; he had even succeeded in coming
to terms with the papacy. The reality, however, was far less rosy
than the propaganda made it appear. Social divisions remained
enormous, and little was done to address the deep-rooted
structural problems of the Italian state and economy.
Mussolini might have remained a hero until his death had not
his callous xenophobia and arrogance, his misapprehension of
Italy’s fundamental necessities, and his dreams of empire led him
to seek foreign conquests. His eye rested first upon Ethiopia,
which, after 10 months of preparations, rumours, threats, and
hesitations, Italy invaded in October 1935. A brutal campaign of
colonial conquest followed, in which the Italians dropped tons of
gas bombs upon the Ethiopian people. Europe expressed its
horror; but, having done so, did no more. The League of
Nations imposed sanctions but ensured that the list of prohibited
exports did not include any, such as oil, that might provoke a
European war.
If the League had imposed oil sanctions, Mussolini said, he would
have had to withdraw from Ethiopia within a week. But he faced
no such problem, and on the night of May 9, 1936, he announced
to an enormous, expectant crowd of about 400,000 people
standing shoulder to shoulder around Piazza Venezia in Rome
that “in the 14th year of the Fascist era” a great event had been
accomplished: Italy had its empire. This moment probably
marked the peak of public support for the regime.
Italy had also found a new ally. Intent upon his own imperial
ambitions in Austria, Adolf Hitler had actively encouraged
Mussolini’s African adventure, and under Hitler’s guidance
Germany had been the one powerful country in western Europe
that had not turned against Mussolini. The way was now open for
the Pact of Steel—a Rome-Berlin Axis and a brutal alliance
between Hitler and Mussolini that was to ruin them both. In
1938, following the German example, Mussolini’s government
passed anti-Semitic laws in Italy that discriminated against Jews
in all sectors of public and private life and prepared the way for
the deportation of some 20 percent of Italy’s Jews to German
death camps during the war.
WW2
While Mussolini understood that peace was essential
to Italy’s well-being, that a long war might prove disastrous, and
that he must not “march blindly with the Germans,” he was beset
by concerns that the Germans “might do good business cheaply”
and that by not intervening on their side in World War II he
would lose his “part of the booty.” His foreign secretary and son-
in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, recorded that during a long,
inconclusive discussion at the Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini at first
agreed that Italy must not go to war, “then he said that honour
compelled him to march with Germany.”
Mussolini watched the progress of Hitler’s war with bitterness
and alarm, becoming more and more bellicose with each fresh
German victory, while frequently expressing hope that the
Germans would be slowed down or would meet with some
reverse that would satisfy his personal envy and give Italy
breathing space. When Germany advanced westward, however,
and France seemed on the verge of collapse, Mussolini felt he
could delay no longer. So, on June 10, 1940, the fateful
declaration of war was made.
From the beginning the war went badly for Italy, and Mussolini’s
opportunistic hopes for a quick victory soon dissolved. France
surrendered before there was an opportunity for even a token
Italian victory, and Mussolini left for a meeting with Hitler, sadly
aware, as Ciano put it, that his opinion had “only a consultative
value.” Indeed, from then on Mussolini was obliged to face the
fact that he was the junior partner in the Axis alliance. The
Germans kept the details of most of their military plans
concealed, presenting their allies with a fait accompli for fear
that prior discussion would destroy surprise. And thus the
Germans made such moves as the occupation of Romania and the
later invasion of the Soviet Union without any advance notice to
Mussolini.
It was to “pay back Hitler in his own coin,” as Mussolini openly
admitted, that he decided to attack Greece through Albania in
1940 without informing the Germans. The result was an
extensive and ignominious defeat, and the Germans were forced
unwillingly to extricate him from its consequences. The 1941
campaign to support the German invasion of the Soviet Union
also failed disastrously and condemned thousands of ill-equipped
Italian troops to a nightmarish winter retreat. Hitler had to come
to his ally’s help once again in North Africa. After the Italian
surrender in North Africa in 1943, the Germans began to take
precautions against a likely Italian collapse. Mussolini had
grossly exaggerated the extent of public support for his regime
and for the war. When the Western Allies successfully
invaded Sicily in July 1943, it was obvious that collapse
was imminent.
For some time Italian Fascists and non-Fascists alike had been
preparing Mussolini’s downfall. On July 24, at a meeting of the
Fascist Grand Council—the supreme constitutional authority of
the state, which had not met once since the war began—an
overwhelming majority passed a resolution that in effect
dismissed Mussolini from office. Disregarding the vote as a
matter of little concern and refusing to admit that his minions
could harm him, Mussolini appeared at his office the next
morning as though nothing had happened. That afternoon,
however, he was arrested by royal command on the steps of the
Villa Savoia after an audience with the king.
Imprisoned first on the island of Ponza, then on a remoter island
off the coast of Sardinia, he was eventually transported to a hotel
high on the Gran Sasso d’Italia in the mountains of Abruzzi, from
which his rescue by the Germans was deemed impossible.
Nevertheless, by crash-landing gliders on the slopes behind the
hotel, a team of German commandos led by Waffen-
SS officer Otto Skorzeny on September 12, 1943, effected his
escape by air to Munich.
Rather than allow the Germans to occupy and govern Italy
entirely in their own interests, Mussolini agreed to Hitler’s
suggestion that he establish a new Fascist government in the
north and execute those members of the Grand Council,
including his son-in-law, Ciano, who had dared to vote against
him. But the Repubblica Sociale Italiana thus established at Salò
was, as Mussolini himself grimly admitted to visitors, no more
than a puppet government at the mercy of the German command.
And there, living in dreams and “thinking only of history and how
he would appear in it,” as one of his ministers said, Mussolini
awaited the inevitable end. Meanwhile, Italian Fascists
maintained their alliance with the Germans and participated in
deportations, the torture of suspected partisans, and the war
against the Allies.
As German defenses in Italy collapsed and the Allies advanced
rapidly northward, the Italian Communists of the partisan
leadership decided to execute Mussolini. Rejecting the advice of
various advisers, including the elder of his two surviving sons—
his second son had been killed in the war—Mussolini refused to
consider flying out of the country, and he made for the Valtellina,
intending perhaps to make a final stand in the mountains; but
only a handful of men could be found to follow him. He tried to
cross the frontier disguised as a German soldier in a convoy of
trucks retreating toward Innsbruck, in Austria. But he was
recognized and, together with his mistress, Claretta Petacci, who
had insisted on remaining with him to the end, he was shot and
killed on April 28, 1945. Their bodies were hung, head
downward, in the Piazza Loreto in Milan. Huge jubilant crowds
celebrated the fall of the dictator and the end of the war.
The great mass of the Italian people greeted Mussolini’s death
without regret. He had lived beyond his time and had dragged
his country into a disastrous war, which it was unwilling and
unready to fight. Democracy was restored in the country after 20
years of dictatorship, and a neo-Fascist Party that carried on
Mussolini’s ideals won only 2 percent of the vote in the 1948
elections.
FIRST WIFE—add
In 1914, in Milan, the future fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, married Ida Dalser, a
34-year-old beautician who soon bore him a child, Benito Albino Mussolini. The
marriage lasted just a few months and on 17 December 1915, before the birth of
Benito Jr., Mussolini, at the time at home on army sick leave, married Rachele Guidi
in a civil ceremony. Guidi had been his long-term mistress and mother to his first
child, Edda, who had been born in 1910.
Mussolini and Rachele Guidi shared the same place of birth – the town of Predappio
in the area of Forlì in northern Italy. Guidi had been born on 11 April 1890. She and
Mussolini had first met when Mussolini appeared at her school as a stand-in
teacher. Guidi’s father had warned her against marrying the penniless Mussolini:
‘That young man will starve you to death,’ he warned. After the death of her father,
Guidi’s mother began a relationship with Mussolini’s widowed father.
In December 1925, ten years after their civil marriage, Rachele and Mussolini were
married in a Catholic church. It was less a romantic gesture than an attempt by
Mussolini to ingratiate himself with the pope, Pius XI. The Mussolinis were to have
five children.

As dictator, Mussolini preached about the importance of the family and liked to
portray his own family as a model fascist household. But in truth, he had little time
for his children and could number his lovers by the hundred. Rachele knew about her
husband’s many indiscretions. In an interview with Life magazine in February 1966,
Rachele said, ‘My husband had a fascination for women. They all wanted him.
Sometimes he showed me their letters – from women who wanted to sleep with him
or have a baby with him. It always made me laugh.’

A beautiful companion

In 1923, Rachele took on a lover of her own – according to Edda in an interview in

1995, shortly before her death and only broadcast in 2001. Rachele, according
to Edda, told Mussolini, ‘You have many women. There is a person who loves me a
lot, a beautiful companion.’ Mussolini may have been shocked but he did nothing to
stop the affair, which, apparently, lasted several years.
(Pictured are Benito and Rachele Mussolini in 1923 with their first three children.
Edda, their eldest, is on the right).
In fact, it was less Mussolini’s dalliances that worried Rachele, than his career in
politics: ‘You can’t be happy in politics… one day things go well,’ she said, ‘another
day things go badly.’ She admitted that she had been at her happiest when they
were poor. ‘She never was,’ declared Life, ‘nor ever wanted to be, anything but a
housewife’. She certainly disliked the trappings of being married to Italy’s most
powerful man. She hated life in Rome and, refusing to live there, avoided the city at
all costs. ‘If I lived in Rome,’ she told Life, ‘I’d be a communist.’
Mussolini was, by all accounts, fearful of his wife. Once, following an argument, she
kicked him out of the house and made him have his dinner on the front steps. One
friend remembered, ‘The Duce was more afraid of her than he was of the Germans.’
In 1930, Edda married Mussolini’s foreign secretary, Galeazzo Ciano. (During
the Second World War, on 11 January 1944, Mussolini had his son-in-law executed,
an act for which Edda never forgave her father: ‘The Italian people must avenge the
death of my husband. If they do not, I’ll do it with my own hands.’) Another
womanizer, Rachele disliked her daughter’s husband and made no attempt to
disguise it.

https://rupertcolley.com/2015/04/11/rachele-mussolini-a-brief-biography/

MISTRESS
In his latter years, while running the Salo Republic, Mussolini had his
mistress, Clara Petacci (pictured), a woman two years younger than his eldest
daughter, set up home nearby – much to Rachele Mussolini’s disgust. Wife and
mistress frequently argued while Mussolini, the diminished dictator, cowered.

Indeed, on one occasion, Rachele, accompanied by a minder, confronted Petacci. On

arriving at the villa gates of her rival, Rachele kept her finger on the doorbell until
Petacci’s own minder came out to tell her to go away. But Rachele forced her way in.
On coming face to face with her husband’s mistress, she demanded that Petacci
move out of the area. Petacci broke down in tears while Rachele called her names.
Both minders waited anxiously in the wings. Petacci tried to read to Rachele letters
sent to her by Mussolini. Unable to bear this, Rachele lunged at Petacci and had to
be restrained by the minders.
Death at Lake Como
In April 1945, Mussolini, knowing the end was in sight, tried to flee to neutral
Switzerland. His companion was not Rachele, his wife of thirty years, but Petacci.
They were caught close to Lake Como very near to the Swiss border by Italian
partisans and executed on 28 April.
Days after the end of the war, Rachele also tried to flee to Switzerland and was also
apprehended at Como by partisans. Handed over to the Allies, she was interned by
the Americans, where she volunteered to cook for her fellow inmates, before being
released within a matter of months. Penniless, she and Edda lived in Rome,
surviving on handouts before eventually returning to Predappio, her place of birth.

PSYCHOLOGICAL
STALIN
After Stalin became the leader of the Soviet Union, he eliminated any person
who could be a potential threat and used numerous unorthodox methods to
suppress his opponents. Stalin‘s jealousy and insecurity grew vastly, he
saw Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) as a potential threat and ordered his exile in
1929 and his assassination in 1940.
From 1924 to 1953 he was a dictator of the Soviet Union, became a purger
of his own party as he instituted the “Great Purge” where over a million
were imprisoned and at least 700,000 executed. He purged more than
40,000 Red Army Officers, some were active participants of the 1917
Bolshevik Revolution and heroes of the Russian Civil War. No member of
Soviet society was left untouched by these purges, which brought down
countless numbers of diplomats, writers, scientists, industrial managers,
scholars, and officials of the Comintern.
The Revolutionary intellectual Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) once stated:
Stalin is a Genghis Khan, an unscrupulous intriguer, who sacrifices everythi
ng else to preserve power.
Stalin encountered series of identity crisis throughout his life probably due
to insecurities that vastly affected him. In his young days he adopted the
name Koba (a Georgian fictional hero) then Stalin (man of
steel), Thavarish Stalin (Comrade Stalin), Vileki Stalin (Great
Stalin), Nash Vilekei Voshd (Our Great Leader) and finally Otsa
Narodov (Father of the Nation). He was troubled by his Georgian heritage
while ruling the Russian masses. He spoke Russian with a thick notable
accent. Even his short stature (165 cm) was compensated for by wearing
built-up shoes.
His defensive high self-esteem created a new cult in the Soviet Union.
Stalin‘s picture replaced the God‘s image, he became a Demigod and
launched anti-religious campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church. His
image appeared in many portraits, posters, statues, films, plays, songs, and
poems.
―Art had to glorify the revolution. Since Stalin was the embodiment of the
revolution, his posters, portraits, busts and statues appeared everywhere.
Five cities were named after him, as well as parks, factories, railways and
canals. The constitution, passed at the height of the show trials in December
1936, was called Stalin‟s Constitution. In his final days, sensing that the end
was imminent, he began self-deification. In July 1951 – between purges –
he commissioned a statue of himself from 33 tonnes of bronze‖. 4

Stalin attempted to construct legitimacy as a successor to Lenin through the

development of a cult of personality whereby he is portrayed as
Communism‘s first philosopher after Marx, Engels, and Lenin. On 6 March
1943 Stalin bestowed upon himself the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union‟,
and he was proclaimed ―the greatest strategist of all times and all peoples
even if he never had any military training or never served in the Army.
Although Stalin found enemies everywhere, he failed to see his biggest
enemy, Hitler, with whom he thought, he could ally. When Hitler invaded the
Soviet Union, Stalin went in to despair. He abandoned all his work and hid
from the public eye. Paradoxically, the war years were psychologically the
most normal time during Stalin‘s rule: for once, the country was not fighting
enemies of the people‘ who were the products of Stalin‘s imagination.
During the Great Patriotic War (World War II) Stalin used to disrupt the
military campaigns, giving unnecessary deadlines. He tried to control
everything on the front-line with the help of the Communist Party
commissars. This had disastrous results as the Germans came close to
capturing Moscow. General Georgy Zhukov (1896-1974) who planned the
major military strategy to defeat Hitler‘s forces had to fight two war fronts
simultaneously, one against Hitler and other one against Stalin‘s ego.
Stalin‘s paranoid defense grew more and more. He saw spies, saboteurs,
and foreign collaborators everywhere, fearing his own shadow and trusting
no one. He increasingly withdrew from official functions and mumbled
menacingly to his close associates that it was time for another purge. His list
of enemies became always longer and his rational thinking was inhibited by
fear and paranoia. The origin of his paranoia probably lies in his upbringing
in Georgia.
The diagnosis of paranoia is well described in the ICD-10 (International
Classification of Diseases) Manual:
―paranoid personality disorder; excessive sensitivity to rejection; bearing
on slights, suspicion; tendency to distort experiences; neutral or friendly
actions of others misinterpreted as hostile or contemptuous; recurring
unjustified suspicions regarding sexual fidelity of spouse or sexual partner;
contentious and continued insistence on their own rights; inflated self-
esteem and frequent, excessive self-absorption.
Stalin was a covert anti-semite. Although in 1930 he publicly stated that
anti-semitism is an extreme form of racial chauvinism, he took a number of
measures to suppress Jewish people in the Soviet Union. One of the strangest
aspects of his anti-semitism was its manifestation at a time when he was
supporting the creation of the State of Israel as he hoped to turn it into a
Soviet satellite similar to the “Popular Democracies” he was setting up
in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, his antisemitic feelings were evident: he
ordered the arrest of Vjačeslav Molotov’s Jewish wife Polina
Zhemchuzhina for greeting in Yiddish to Golda Meir, the first Israeli
ambassador to Moscow during a Kremlin reception. He invented “Delo
Vrachey” (Doctors’ plot) and arrested prominent Jewish doctors like Dr.
Kogan, Feldman, Ettinger, Vovsi, Grinstein, Ginzburg, and many others. Stalin
executed thirteen Jewish intellectuals who were academics, writers and poets
active in various cultural realms. He banned Boris Pasternak’s novels and
poems, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945 and sent to a Gulag.
Stalin felt empty and bored inside probably due to his inferiority complex.
Very seldom he left Moscow and most of the time he stayed in his ―
dach (country house) in ― Kuntsevo (an area west of Moscow) always
surrounded by same people.
In such a tedious environment he was determining the destiny of millions of
people to send them before a firing squad or to a labor camp. This gave him
immense sense of power and control internally and externally and made him
feel omnipotent.
His neurotic traits were known to the professionals as early as in 1927. The
great Russian psychologist Vladimir Mikhailovic Bekhterev (1857–1927)
was ordered to examine Stalin in December 1927 during the First All-Russian
Neurological Congress in Moscow. Bektharev‘s diagnosis was paranoia. After
making this diagnosis, the psychologist had less than 24 hours to live as he
died mysteriously without a post mortem autopsy.
In the later years some prominent Soviet psychiatrists suggested a
number of other aspects of his psychopathology: paranoid schizophrenia,
a delirious condition, derived from paranoid psychopathy, placing Stalin in
the category of ― epileptic–psychopaths. Other psychiatrists stated
that Stalin was
―cruel, devoid of any feeling of pity, completely amoral”.
Professor Russell V. Lee (1895-1982) of the Stanford University Medical
School wrote: ―In Russia there was Joseph Stalin, the man of steel
and ruthless slayer of millions of his own people; completely devoid of
scruples of any
kind, he was a sociopath, a moral imbecile, and in complete control of Rus
sia.
Stalin could disconnect himself from warm human emotions. His ability
to emotionally cut himself off from individuals who had once seemed to be
close to him was one of the sources of his cruelty. He drove his second
wife Nadia Allilueva to commit suicide. He had shallow feelings for his son
Yakov from his first marriage as when Yakov became a POW during the
Battle of Smolensk in 1941, Stalin did not make any attempt to release or
comfort him. Yakov committed suicide at the Sachsenhausen death camp in
1943. Stalin’s malevolent attitude towards his other children affected them
detrimentally. He was a self centered person and an isolated character
who had no value in friendships. He could harm his close associates without
any personal feelings. One refinement of Stalin‘s sadistic cruelty was to
reassure personally some of his colleagues and subordinates that they were
safe to the extent of toasting their ―brotherhood, and then have them
arrested shortly afterward sometimes the very same day.
Stalin was troubled by delusions of conspiracy and feelings of
victimization. He saw enemies everywhere. He suspected Red Army Marshal
Vasily Blyukher (1890-1938) was a Japanese spy and had him killed in 1938.
He thought the Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (1890-1986), was an
American agent. He constantly accused Lavrentij Beria (1899-1953) for being
an English spy. He thought that his personal physician Doctor Vladimir
Vinogradov (1921- 1997) was an agent of British intelligence.
Stalin fantasized the Doctors’ Plot an antisemitic campaign in the Soviet
Union organized by Stalin from 1951 to 1953 whereby a group of
predominantly Jewish doctors from Moscow were accused of a conspiracy to
assassinate Soviet leaders. General Nikolai Vlasik (1896-1967), the head of
Stalin‘s bodyguards was arrested on false charges in connection with the
Doctors‘ Plot. As Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) recalled, Stalin
― instilled in …us all the suspicion that we were all surrounded by enemies.
Leon Trotsky (1897- 1940) intensely documented
Stalin’s unstable and unpredictable moods. Lazar Kaganovich (1893-
1991) one of the main associates of Joseph Stalin remarked: he was a
― different man at different times … I knew no less than five or six Stalins.
He eschewed medical advice, listening to a veterinarian and treating his
hypertension with iodine drops. His mental and physical health started to
deteriorate rapidly. He became more suspicious, irritable and paranoid and
suffered at least one stroke prior to his fatal intracerebral
haemorrhage in 1953. Given his untreated hypertension and the autopsy
report, it is probable that he had a number of lacunar strokes. These tend to
predominate in the fronto-basal areas, and disconnect the circuits that
underpin cognition and behaviour. The most plausible explanation of Stalin’s
late behavior is the dimming of a superior intellect and the unleashing of a
paranoid personality by a multi-infarct state.
Tens of thousands of people had disappeared under his regime.
The NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) or secret police carried
out mass arrests and executions and often used black vehicles to abduct
people. It was considered as a bad omen to see one and in seeing them, old
women used to make the sign of cross on their foreheads. Vasili
Blokhin (1895-1955) served as the chief executioner of the NKVD especially
selected by Stalin. He is known as the history‘s most prolific executioner. In
later years Blokhin suffered from alcohol-induced psychosis or PTSD and
committed suicide.
He also showed all the signs of ―hubris syndrome‖, first described by Lord
David Owen in 2009 where ―hubris means ―pride in Greek. It refers
to a syndrome, a cluster of symptoms or a disorder of the possession of
power. It was formulated as a pattern of behavior in a person who sees the
world as a place for self-glorification through the use of power, has a
tendency to take action primarily to enhance his personal image, exhibits
messianic zeal and exaltation in speech, conflates self with nation or
organization, uses the royal we in conversation, shows excessive self-
confidence, manifestly has contempt for others, shows accountability
only to a higher court (history or God), displays unshakeable belief that they
will be vindicated in that court, loses contact with reality, resorts to
restlessness, recklessness and impulsive actions.
Dmitrij Volkogonov (1928-1995), a Soviet historian, (1988) considered that
the combination of paranoid personality disorder, alcohol abuse, intelligence,
and a cruel nature created the foundation for Stalin’s
infamous mass killings.
His delusions and obsessions caused millions to suffer. A troubled
upbringing, depression, paranoia, and alcohol abuse suggests
psychopathology as an implicating factor behind his actions.
According to various historians, the actual numbers of Stalin’s
victims range from 20 to 60 million. He was pathologically fascinated
by death and saw it as a perfect remedy for all social maladies. Moreover,
he stirred fear psychosis in the society deporting massive numbers of
people to the Gulags (Soviet concentration camps). His slave army built
canals, hydro dams, railways and cities.

HITLER
Adolf Hitler suffered from manic- depressive syndrome.

He confided completely in his only friend August Kubizek (1888-1956), who

was both sensible and perceptive, and who quickly realized that there were
two Hitler‘s, one remarkable for his ―ecstatic dedication and activity while
the other had ―dangerous fits of depression.
After the Vienna Academy of Arts rejected twice admittance to Hitler as a
student, he fell into a deep, paranoid, delusional depression which gave
rise to anti-Semitic hatred. Unable to admit to himself that his talent might
be insufficient, he blamed the Jewish members of the faculty and wrote to the
academy‘s director: ―For this, the Jews will pay.

During the depressive stage, Hitler was despairing, indecisive, isolated, and
unable to care for himself, to concentrate and to remember. He was hesitant,
confused, despondent and apathetic, and had a phobic dread of horses,
water and the moon. He washed his hands constantly because of his
obsessive fear of germs. He had a phobic aversion of and paranoid delusions
about Jews as contaminants, and compulsively tried to cleanse the world
of them.
During the manic stage, he was egotistical, arrogant, grandiose, loquacious,
aggressive, and irritable. He had grandiose Aryan delusions of omnipotence,
invincibility and infallibility, violent mood swings, rages, racing thoughts and
pressured speech. He was ruthless, willful, indifferent to the feelings of
others, intolerant of criticism, and had a need to dominate others. His
overwhelming emotional force and persuasiveness, both symptoms related to
mania, were instrumental in ―convincing millions of his countrymen with his
grandiose and paranoid delusions.

– Adolf Hitler was a master of propaganda, at once actor,

choreographer, orator and self-publicist… He hired Heinrich Hoffmann as his
personal photographer to produce images that projected sheer determination
and fanatical willpower, showing a grim look, raised eyebrows, lips pressed
together, arms resolutely folded. After 1933 Hitler worked on his
broadcasting skills, making sure no one could escape his voice as
loudspeaker pillars were erected in cities, mobile loudspeakers taken to sm
all towns‖. - Frank Dikotter, “The Great Dictators”, History Today, vol. 69,
6

October 10, 2019, p.69-70

Hitler‘s hatred of Jews emanated from his paranoid, obsessive, and

delusional fear of them. Paranoid visions of (nonexistent) Jews in the Kremlin
hurling the Soviet hordes against Germany‘s eastern flank compelled him to
invade Russia.
Starting World War II was an act of insanity. By invading Poland, Hitler
turned what had been a Japanese plan of conquest of the Pacific into a world
war. His irrational hatred of Poles formed part of his determination to conquer
Poland. He also detested Jehovah‘s witnesses, Catholics, Gypsies, gays,
Communists, journalists, judges, smokers, poets, Freemasons, and anybody
who was not a vegetarian.
The paranoid delusions of manic-depressives
lead to ―induced psychosis‖. Had Hitler succeeded in his grandiose
ambitions he would have been on course to exterminate every human being,
for ultimately everyone would have become his enemy. The same could be
said about Joseph Stalin.
Hitler started a war on the pretext of leading their compatriots to glory,
to increase his personal power and all leaving his country in ruins and
millions of his countrymen dead.
Peace and security depend more on the actions of manic-depressives, than
on the mere possession of weapons of mass destruction.

MUSSOLINI
Benito Mussolini‘s (1883-1945) father Alessandro (1854-1910), was a
socialist journalist and blacksmith, and his mother Rosa Maltoni (1858-
1905) was a schoolteacher. The family was poor, they lived in two crowded
rooms on the second floor of a small ruined building. As a child, Mussolini was
disobedient, unmanageable, and aggressive, a bully at school and moody at
home. He was expelled from grammar and high school for assaulting pupils
with his penknife but he was intelligent and able to pass his final
examinations without any difficulty. He obtained a teaching diploma, realized
he was unsuited for such work and at 19, left Italy for Switzerland, jumping
from job to job. He was a gifted orator who read many books on political
philosophy by Immanuel Kant, Benedict de Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Karl Kautsky, and Georges Sorel. He impressed his
companions as a potential revolutionary leader with an uncommon
personality but was arrested several times. He returned to Italy in 1904,
keeping busy with trade-union work, journalism, and extreme politics, which
led to arrest and imprisonment.
During a period of freedom in 1909, he fell in love with the 16-year-old
Rachele Guidi, the younger of the two daughters of his father‘s widowed
mistress. She went to live with him in a damp, cramped apartment in Forlì
and later married him.

After writing in a wide variety of socialist papers, he founded a newspaper of

his own, La Lotta di Classe (―The Class Struggle‖). This paper was
so successful that in 1912 he was appointed editor of the official Socialist
newspaper, Avanti! (―Forward!‖), whose circulation soon doubled.
He strongly opposed Italy‘s participation in World War I but then changed his
mind. He resigned from Avanti! and was expelled from the Socialist Party.
Financed by the French government and Italian industrialists, both of whom
favored war against Austria, he assumed the editorship of Il Popolo
d‟Italia (―The People of Italy‖), in which he unequivocally stated his new
philosophy:
―From today onward we are all Italians and nothing but Italians‖.
Now he preferred fascism over socialism.
Mussolini organized groups of fascist fighters (fasci di combattimento). In
late 1920, encouraged by Mussolini, the Blackshirt squads attacked local
government institutions and prevent left-wing administrations from taking
power. The government, dominated by middle-class liberals, did little to
combat this lawlessness, both through weak political will and a desire to see
the mainly working-class left defeated.
In rallies, Mussolini‘s words were so dramatic, his metaphors well-suited, his
gestures vigorous and repetitive.

―… he spent half of his time projecting himself as the omniscient,

omnipotent and indispensable ruler of Italy… He was a master at projecting
his own image, carefully studying certain gestures and poses. He rehearsed
in Villa Torlonia, a vast neoclassical villa on a sprawling estate, which became
his residence in 1925. In the evenings he would sit in a comfortable chair in a
projection room to study every detail of his public performance. His theatrical
gestures – head leaning halfway back, chin jutting sharply forward, rolling
eyes – were calculated to give an impression of power and vitality”. 7

Mussolini suffered from cyclothymia with moods fluctuating from mild

depression to hypomania and back again, from hypomania characterized by
persistent disinhibition and mood elevation (euphoria), manic-
depressive or bipolar syndrome, a serious mental illness in which a
person experiences extreme and fluctuating changes in mood, energy,
activity, and concentration or focus. In manic episodes, he felt very happy,
irritable, or ―up,‖ and there was a marked increase in activity level. In
depressive episodes, he felt sad, indifferent, or hopeless with a very low
activity level.
During the manic phase, his mental capacity and memory remained normal
with preserved histrionic and theatrical capacities. He was also affected by a
very serious inferiority complex, he felt inferior to others which drove him
to overcompensate with spectacular achievements. It may have arisen from
parental attitudes and upbringing, disapproving, negative remarks and
evaluations of behavior emphasizing mistakes and shortcomings or from
physical defects such as height (he was only 5 feet 5 inches tall) or being
bald. Mussolini became a dictator to feel superior to others as he attempted
to free himself from this complex. The psychoanalyst Alfred Adler (1870-
1937) stated rulers are not always strong men; it‘s those they rule who are
weak, millions of naive and superficial followers.
His speeches were widely reproduced. At a gathering of 40,000 Fascists in
Naples on October 24 1922,
th
he threatened,
―Either the government will be given to us, or we will seize it by marching
on Rome.‖ The March on Rome really began and on October 31 King Victor
st

Emmanuel III invited him to become Chancellor. His shrewd calculations and
astute opportunism had helped him to achieve his goal at 39 years of age.
Italy‘s fragile democratic system was abolished in favour of a one-party
state. Opposition parties, trade unions, and the free press were outlawed.
Free speech was crushed. A basic slogan proclaimed that Mussolini was
always right (Italian: ―Il Duce ha sempre ragione‖). ―Duce‖ is an Italian
title, derived from the Latin word dux “leader”. Yet, he was hailed by public
figures worldwide as a genius and a superman. His achievements were
considered little less than miraculous. He had carried out his social reforms
and public works without losing the support of the industrialists and
landowners; he had even succeeded in coming to terms with the papacy.
Mussolini might have remained a hero until his death had not his
callous xenophobia and arrogance, his misapprehension of Italy‘s
fundamental necessities and his dreams of empire, led him to seek foreign
conquests in Ethiopia and Somalia.
Both Hitler and Mussolini were gigantic egomaniacs who passionately
believed themselves to have been sent by Providence to fulfill important
roles in world history. They had no regard for human life and no remorse in
sacrificing the lives of millions to fulfill their megalomaniacal obsessions.
There were, of course, many differences between the two dictators. For one
thing, Mussolini was very much a ladies’ man who cheated on his wife on
numerous occasions. Hitler, on the other hand, was too fanatically devoted to
his own mission as leader of the National Socialist revolution to develop any
acceptable emotional life. Mussolini was less ideologically driven than Hitler.
Despite his background as a socialist, Mussolini was less radical than Hitler.
Fascism as it developed under “Il Duce” was generally a reactionary ideology
used by conservative forces to counter the growing threat of anarchism and
communism. National Socialism, on the other hand, envisaged a complete
transformation of society along racial lines. This reflected Hitler’s
monomaniacal obsession with race, an obsession not shared by Mussolini.