[man yelling a chant]
[all chant]
(all, in German) Heil! Sieg heil!
(male narrator) Europe 2018.
From the Austria to Sweden,
Hungary to Greece,
ultranationalism is on the rise.
[man yells]
(narrator) Fueled by xenophobia and a promise
to fight for the rights of white Europeans,
Extremist groups are emerging from the fringes
and onto the public stage.
It's a jarring sight.
But the world has been here before.
The ideologies that drive these groups
can be traced back almost 100 years
to one man...
Italy's Benito Mussolini
[cheering & chanting] Il Duce! Il Duce!
Mussolini has been dismissed as a buffoon,
a small-time tyrant who ruled
in the shadow of Hitler and Stalin.
But he was no one's disciple.
We heard for years that Hitler taught Mussolini
everything he knew-- in fact, it's the opposite.
(narrator) Years before the Third Reich, Mussolini was the architect
of a movement that would plunge the continent into darkness.
He called it fascism.
[cheering & chanting]
(man) Il Duce! Il Duce!
From undermining judges, to indoctrinating children,
Mussolini pioneered tactics
that other dictators would use to seize power.
Mussolini absolutely wrote the blueprint
for how to destroy a democracy.
(narrator) How did this son of a blacksmith
come to write key chapters of the dictator's playbook
and turn himself into a modern Caesar?
(woman) Dictatorships have had an incredible impact
in the past century.
These dictators ended up learning from one another.
(man) They're all different but many use the same tactics.
(woman) The use of terror. (man) Propaganda.
(woman) Control the elites. Create an enemy.
Cult of personality. (man) Use violence--
These are tools that dictators use to stay in power.
(man)
(narrator) Benito Mussolini is born in 1883
in the northern Italian village of Predappio.
Like many Italians,
his family lives in almost abject poverty.
His father works hard as a blacksmith
but making ends meet is difficult.
Much of Italy remains an almost feudal society.
While it has a limited democracy,
most of the power rests with the king and his ministers.
The majority of the population is rural and poor.
Under these difficult conditions,
Mussolini grows into a violent child.
(Matthew Feldman) There were elements of his personality,
that we could already see at a pretty young age,
including a kind of attraction towards violence.
I mean, this guy's expelled at the age of 11
for knifing a fellow classmate.
Something that he does again and again.
He keeps getting in trouble for knifing people.
(narrator) As he becomes a young man, much of his anger
is directed at the backward nature of his country.
As millions of his countrymen abandon Italy
to seek a better life abroad,
Mussolini becomes determined to
change his country for the better, but he's not sure how.
Even though he wasn't religious himself, he saw himself,
very similar to Hitler, as a man of providence.
Someone almost divinely appointed
to heal Italy's rifts.
(narrator) Like his father before him,
he is drawn to an extreme form of socialism.
It calls for a violent revolution
that will strip the rich of their wealth
and share it with the poor.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) Mussolini had a rebellious, hothead temper.
He wanted an overthrow of everything, he was a disrupter.
(Matthew Feldman) This is a violent man willing to use violent means, either
politically, or personally, right from the start.
(narrator) His violent nature brings him
into frequent conflict with the law.
July 1903.
After moving to nearby Switzerland,
Mussolini is arrested for allegedly
trying to incite a revolution.
He's deported back to Italy.
(Matthew Feldman) I think it's interesting that he's in and out of prison a lot,
so by the time that he's 20 years old.
He's come back and lived a pretty rough existence,
hiding from the police, on trial in a number of cases.
(narrator) But Mussolini's more than just a troublemaker.
From a young age he's a gifted writer,
and as he hones his craft, he discovers
how language can be a tool for shaping a nation.
In time he makes a name for himself
as a prominent socialist journalist.
(Marla Stone) His skill as a journalist was absolutely central.
He knew what to play up.
He knew how to play on people's fears,
he knew how to play on people's dreams,
(narrator) In 1912, Mussolini is hired as editor of Avanti!,
Italy's leading socialist paper.
Under his leadership, circulation doubles.
He should be on top of the world.
He's a crusading journalist for one of Italy's leading papers.
But his faith in socialism is wavering.
it seems to be moving too slowly
for the man of action.
He's exposed to a new movement
that celebrates speed, power, and violence.
Its followers call themselves futurists,
and their ideas will contribute to the rise of fascism.
(Marla Stone) Futurism was an artistic, cultural, intellectual movement
founded in 1909 by a group of Italian artists.
They wanted an art and culture of speed,
of movement, of technology.
(narrator) The futurists celebrate action,
adventure, violence, and its ultimate expression-- war.
[loud explosions]
Before World War 1, many people welcomed the idea of war
without knowing how awful it would be,
of course, as a kind of cleansing force
for the decadence that ruled in society.
There was a famous quote from one of the futurist manifestos,
"War is the hygiene of the world."
(narrator) August 1914.
The futurists rejoice
as the carnage of World War I begins.
Mussolini calls for Italy to enter the conflict.
But the socialists oppose the war, knowing that
the working class on both sides will do the fighting.
They kick Mussolini out of the party.
For the young agitator, it's a turning point.
He leaves his position as editor of Avanti!,
the Italian socialist paper, and he founds
what will be the fascist newspaper, "Il Popolo d'Italia."
(narrator) Bankrolled by wealthy industrialists
who favor joining the battle,
Mussolini uses its pages to beat the drum for war.
[loud explosions]
In 1915, Italy enters the Great War
on the side of Britain, France, and Russia.
Now Mussolini must do more than write about war.
He is drafted and joins the fight himself.
On the battlefield he witnesses the power of nationalism
and learns how it can motivate men into action.
If it can lead men to storm a machine-gun nest, he reasons
it can power a revolution.
I think he realizes that the power of nationalism
is something that is
a massive building block for a political party.
(narrator) In February of 1917,
Mussolini is wounded and returns to Milan.
There he begins to create a new political ideology
that builds on the nationalism he experienced in the trenches.
He calls it fascism.
It's hard to overestimate how revolutionary it was.
It was a new political system.
Fascism takes certain things from the left, like revolution,
but marries them with
a nationalist, imperialist doctrine
and it makes an amalgam of something new.
(narrator) Fascism celebrates military might,
extreme devotion to country,
and the superiority of the Italian people.
It is also built around a promise--
to restore Italy to the grandeur of ancient Rome.
Even the name "fascism" is an attempt to link the movement
with Italy's glorious past.
The name comes from "Fasce,"
the Latin word for the bundle of rods
that symbolized authority and power in the age of Caesar.
He played on the idea
that he was going to make Italy great again.
Italy, really since the time of the Roman Empire,
had been beaten up in the international sphere.
He talked about things like Italians are seen by the world
as spaghetti-eaters and mandolin players.
Italians are going to be warriors.
And he was going to create a fascist new man.
(narrator) At the age of 35,
the rebel has finally found his cause.
Through speeches, through his newspaper,
Mussolini spreads the new ideology.
His ideas find fertile ground among his fellow soldiers.
(Marla Stone) So they come home from the war
with this memory of great violence.
They have shell shock or what we would today call PTSD.
Mussolini brings together all these discontents.
(narrator) In Milan, and then throughout the north,
he gathers a core group of true believers.
They call themselves "Blackshirts."
They model their uniform on that of the Arditi,
the elite Italian brigade of the First World War.
(Matthew Feldman) Mussolini hosts a meeting of futurists
and war veterans on the 23rd of March,
it's a meeting of kind of strange characters, 50 of whom
decide they're going to form the first fascist movement.
(narrator) Less than a month later,
they send a message to Italy's socialists.
A Fascist squad demolishes the offices of Avanti!,
the newspaper Mussolini once led.
Four people are killed.
If you needed one word to define fascism
in its early years-- violence.
A kind of tactical violence is really at the core.
(narrator) Mussolini has a gang,
but he wants an army.
To build one, he uses an essential tool of dictatorship.
One of the important tools for any dictatorship
is to create an enemy.
They need to have some sort of enemy
that they can use as a scapegoat,
as a unifying force
to galvanize the public and the elites behind their rule.
(Dan Slater) There's really no better way
to get a dictator in a position where he will be unchallenged
than if people believe he is actually protecting them,
protecting their country from ruination
at the hands of neighbors,
internal enemies who they do not trust.
(narrator) Mussolini did not have to look far to find the ideal enemy.
Two years earlier in October 1917,
Vladimir Lenin's Communist Revolution created
a political earthquake that was felt around the world.
For many it was seen as the end of capitalism,
the end of private property, the end of God.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) Communism terrified people,
for the real changes it could bring--
emancipation of workers, destruction of capital.
(narrator) Following the end of the war,
inflation and unemployment soar throughout Italy,
and communism's appeal begins to spread.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) There was a sense of emergency after World War I in Italy.
The communist party had just been founded
on the heel of the Russian Revolution.
The socialist party was mushrooming.
Worker's rights were leading to occupations at the factories,
there was a situation some called a civil war.
(narrator) In 1920, some 2 million Italian workers
participate in more than 2000 strikes.
Factories are closed, manufacturing stops.
Italy's democratically elected government
seems powerless to stop the chaos.
Just 8 years earlier, all Italian males
were given the vote,
but the experiment with democracy isn't working.
(Marla Stone) There was almost a consensus in Europe that democracy
is not necessarily the best form of government.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) Democracy to some was uninspiring.
It was fat old men discussing things in parliament
and never getting anything done.
Compromise and collaboration didn't seem to be the way
to respond to situations of crisis.
(narrator) Italy appears on the brink of revolution.
And Mussolini claims the fascists
are the only ones who can stop it.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) One thing that strongmen really know how to do
is become the prophets of doom.
And this is counterintuitive for politicians.
You wouldn't think someone would go up in front of his people
and say you're all doomed, like negative politics.
But what strongmen do, and Mussolini was the first
to really specialize in doing this, he said
everything is cracking, everything is going downhill.
But I will reverse the degeneration,
and I am your savior.
(narrator) Mussolini writes an appeal to the nation,
calling on every soldier
to join the fight against the communists.
He takes his message to the streets,
holding rallies, giving speeches.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) Mussolini really knew how to speak
to the psychological worry of communism.
He pathologized communism.
He talked about the rats coming from the east
that brought a contagion with them.
(narrator) Mussolini's warnings attract allies to the fascist cause.
Industrialists and landowners offer financial support.
(Marla Stone) Fascism appealed to them.
Fascism said we're going to stand up for you.
This is a revolutionary situation, your interests
are threatened, we're going to bring law and order.
(narrator) The ranks of Blackshirts swell
as more men answer the call to stop the Red Wave.
To make good on his promise to help end the crisis,
Mussolini turns to another tactic of the dictator.
Most dictators use violence and force
to eliminate dissent from within the regime,
and to threaten the opposition from rising up against them.
However, Mussolini used force and violence
in a completely different way.
The fascists glorified the use of violence,
they were very clear they were also
going to use violence to attain the goals of the state,
no matter what the cost.
(narrator) Soon the fascist mob is unleashed on the socialists.
They go into cities and towns
and they physically destroy union halls,
they murder, and beat up socialist leaders.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) Of course, this violence was very traumatizing
because it was at a local level.
People would have their homes burned,
they would be assaulted in the street.
(narrator) As the strikes come to an end, Mussolini claims
that the fascists have helped restore order.
His next move marks a major shift in strategy.
He helps create a fascist political party
and prepares to run in the upcoming elections.
(Matthew Feldman) I think one of the contradictions we see is
that this is a person of revolutionary temperament
from the start, but who's willing to compromise
and work within the system when he needs to.
(narrator) May 15, 1921.
Mussolini and a handful of fascists
are elected to Parliament.
Now fascism is more than an ideology.
It is a political force.
But it's clear that Mussolini
has no intention of playing by democracy's rules.
(Matt Feldman) By and large fascists hated democracy even if
they accepted they had to work within some of its strictures.
They saw liberalism as old-fashioned,
and something that really belonged to the 19th century.
The 20th century was meant for men of action.
(narrator) Just 18 months after being elected,
Mussolini and a core group of fascists hatch a plan
to undermine Italy's democracy from within.
Once again they rely on the threat of violence.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) He believed that change
can only come through violent struggle,
not through elections, not through the pace
of normal societal, cultural change.
Change had to come in
a wrenching, violent way, through insurrection.
(narrator) October, 1922...
30,000 Blackshirts march on Rome, seizing
key government offices and train stations along the way.
Mussolini demands that King Victor Emmanuel
name him Prime Minister, the key position in parliament.
While Italy is a democracy,
the king still has the power to name the prime minister.
If the king doesn't comply with Mussolini's wishes, he's told
the fascist horde will storm the capitol and take power.
But Mussolini is playing a dangerous game.
The king also commands the army and the national police force.
With one order he could crush
Mussolini and his movement.
But the king and his key ministers hesitate.
They were fearful of civil war.
They were fearful of anarchy
and perhaps as socialist uprising as well.
(narrator) For two days, Rome braces for civil war.
Now, the march on Rome is very interesting
as an example of the psychological warfare.
There were only 30,000 Blackshirts
in a nation of over 40 million
with an army and a police who were loyal to the king.
Mussolini really posed himself as a man of order,
a strong man, who would be able to tame this unruly country.
(narrator) But in the end, the king buckles
and offers Mussolini the jackpot--
the office of Prime Minister.
[cheers & applause]
Many people, the king included,
were not only afraid of the left,
they were tired of all of the upheaval in general.
(Matthew Feldman) They thought, well, our politics are so broken,
maybe this man can fix it.
So there was a sense of doing a deal with the devil, really.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) The way that Mussolini actually got power in 1922 is
a cautionary tale for the rest of the 20th century and today.
Many people supported him
because they thought they could contain him.
They thought he was a hothead,
and they could invite him into government,
even as prime minister, and then he would calm down.
And this proved to be fatally wrong.
(narrator) Just days after taking office
Mussolini addresses the government.
He gives one of the most extreme speeches in Italy's history
in the first meeting of the chamber of deputies,
that's the 16th of November, 1922.
(narrator) Speaking to the elected representatives
for the first time, Mussolini makes his objective clear--
obey me or be dissolved.
(Matthew Feldman) Some of the other fascist deputies
start turning up in military regalia,
start bringing revolvers into the chamber of deputies.
(narrator) Mussolini's got the top job,
but real power in the government
goes to the political party with the most seats.
The fascists hold just a handful;
Mussolini is determined to change that.
April 6, 1924, election day.
Fascist thugs are posted
outside polling stations throughout the country.
Their instructions-- grab the first man
to exit the polling booth
and beat him for not voting for the fascists.
It doesn't matter who he did vote for.
The beaten man will be a warning for for those waiting to vote.
Through violence, intimidation and vote-rigging,
the fascists win 65% of the seats in parliament.
The victory gives them a clear majority
and seemingly overwhelming power.
[cheering & chanting]
But fierce opposition in parliament remains.
Giacomo Matteotti, a leading left-wing politician,
calls for the election to be nullified.
He condemns Mussolini and accuses him
of corruption and intimidation.
(Matthew Feldman) Matteotti was a brave leader, and he was somebody
that had been assaulted a number of times by the fascists,
but he refused to give up, and he was the person who stood up
and said in 1924 that the 6th of April election was invalid
because of fascist fraud and violence, and that was
something that Mussolini took as a personal slight.
He refused to give in or be bought off,
and I think that made him a threat to Mussolini.
Matteotti knew that what he was doing was very dangerous.
Many anti-fascists had been beaten up and killed,
not at the level of Matteotti, but Matteotti didn't care.
He was as brave as they come.
(narrator) Once again, the problem will be solved with violence.
Shortly after denouncing Mussolini,
Matteotti is kidnapped by a group of armed fascists.
He is never seen alive again.
Two months later, his body is found
in a culvert outside Rome.
While there's no proof,
many believe that Mussolini is behind the murder.
As he's gained more power, Mussolini has grown more brazen.
But this time he may have gone too far.
January, 1925.
Outrage over the murder of Giacomo Matteotti is spreading.
The assassination of Matteotti and the public outcry
was the biggest crises he had ever faced.
Even veterans who had been with him since 1919,
start turning in their party cards.
(narrator) Mussolini must act quickly.
But instead of denying his involvement in the killing,
he does something extraordinary.
Mussolini declares I alone assume
political, moral and historical responsibility
for all that has happened.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) Most politicians wouldn't want to be
associated so openly with a political assassination.
But fascism is built on violence,
it had come to power on violence, and it was time
for Mussolini to boast that he was above the law as well.
(narrator) To remove any doubt as to who's in charge,
he adopts the name Il Duce,
Latin for leader.
[chanting "Il Duce"]
In parliament, Mussolini openly declares
the beginning of his dictatorship.
He moves to undermine a cornerstone
of any democratic society--
an independent judicial system.
He removes the two judges
leading the investigation into the murder.
Then, In July of 1925,
he announces an amnesty for the men accused of the crime.
Matteotti's killers are released.
[crowd chanting "Il Duce"]
(narrator) Over the next two years,
Mussolini systematically guts
Italy's remaining democratic institutions.
He tightens censorship of the press,
banning any negative coverage.
Fascist squads attack stores that sell dissenting papers.
(Matthew Feldman) Even though some of the mainstream press
like the Corriere della Sera had
hundreds of thousands in circulation,
they were no longer really allowed to report the news.
They were allowed to report on how great Mussolini was.
(narrator) To ferret out potential enemies,
Mussolini oversees the creation
of a network of secret police.
(Marla Stone) Fascist Italy was a police state.
The police had incredible power to arrest and detain people,
to send them into internal exile,
and that included all political dissidents
or people who might seem to be political dissidents,
people who told the wrong kind of joke in the trattoria.
(narrator) But Mussolini doesn't rule through intimidation alone.
To increase his support, he adopts several new polices.
(Marla Stone) In the wake of the great depression the regime began
a program of massive public works-- road building,
town building, public education,
they sent nurses into the countryside
to teach infant hygiene to poor mothers.
(narrator) These policies help make him
wildly popular with many Italians.
1929...
Just 10 years after the birth of his fascist movement,
Mussolini is in almost complete control of Italy.
Now, to ensure the devotion
of the next generation of Italians,
he uses another tactic
(narrator) Dictators often use indoctrination
to create unwavering devotion to the leader
and justify the harshness of the regime.
(Natasha Ezrow) You see that dictatorship
very early on would start to indoctrinate the public.
It would happen during people's impressionable years
when people were most likely to absorb this kind of information
and internalize it and really believe it.
It was about convincing people that there was no other way,
there was no alternative, that this was the only type
of rule that could satisfy the needs of the nation.
(narrator) In the schools, old textbooks are replaced
with pro-fascist versions.
Even the cover of an exercise book
is an opportunity to promote his rule.
Mussolini proclaims: "At every hour of every day,
I can tell you on which page
of which book each schoolchild in Italy is studying."
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) Mussolini played an intimate role
in crafting fascism's message.
Not only because he was a journalist, but because
he understood the mechanisms of mass indoctrination.
His slogans that he came up with for every occasion
circulated not only in textbooks,
but they were carved into buildings,
they were even on shirts, they were sometimes on furniture,
they were everywhere along with his own image.
(Marla Stone) There was actually something called
the "Fascist Ten Commandments," that by the mid '30s,
school children and even college students had to memorize.
And one of the Fascist Ten Commandments was,
"Mussolini is always right."
(narrator) Piero Signorelli was born in 1925.
The only Italy he knew was Mussolini's Italy.
[Piero speaks Italian]
[chanting in Italian]
[band plays in bright marching rhythm]
Making young people committed, even fanatical fascists,
was at the core of fascist ideology.
The cult of youth was something central to fascism.
[man counts cadence for the exercise]
(narrator) To further tighten his hold over the public, Mussolini will
pioneer another essential tactic of dictatorship.
(Natasha Ezrow) Dictators like to build personality cults
because it enables them to rule
without always having to resort to force.
It enables them to mesmerize the public,
to ensure that the public adores them.
And to prevent threats from opponents.
(narrator) Mussolini styles himself not merely as a man of the people
but as the one and only leader of the nation
[Piero speaks Italian]
(Matthew Feldman) The way in which Mussolini shaped his own image,
cultivated foreigners to see him as really,
one of the great Caesars in the modern era,
was core to the way that Mussolini saw himself,
but also the way in which he represented the new Italy.
(narrator) To strengthen his bond with the nation,
Mussolini perfects the art of connecting with the crowd.
[speaking Italian]
[extremely loud cheering]
(Matthew Feldman) Mussolini could be a very powerful speaker;
bombastic, chest stuck out, shouting to crowds.
this idea of speaking to thousands upon thousands
of people at these oceanic assemblies,
that was something that Mussolini had perfected.
[loud cheering]
(narrator) Realizing he cannot be in front of every Italian visually,
he finds a revolutionary means to connect
with the entire Italian public-- radio.
[Mussolini speaks in Italian]
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) Under the Mussolini the radio
became one of the primary sources of propaganda.
[Mussolini speaks on radio in Italian]
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) And so people would gather together to listen to the Duce.
[Mussolini speaks on the radio in Italian]
Listening to the radio together
becomes a kind of cohesive moment of social interaction.
Just like going to the movies.
(narrator) Mussolini's actions quickly find
admirers outside Italy as well.
One in particular has taken keen notice
of his meteoric rise to power.
January 30th, 1933.
Adolf Hitler takes control
of Germany's democratically elected government.
He does it by using
many of the same tactics pioneered by Mussolini.
Hitler's private army of "Brown shirts," the mass rallies,
even the Nazi salute-- all can be traced back to Mussolini.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) We heard for years
that Hitler taught Mussolini everything he knew.
In fact, it's the opposite.
Hitler came to power after Mussolini
had already been there for 11 years.
[loud cheering]
People like Hitler were hugely influenced by him,
so the March on Rome is something that Hitler sees
as a gesture to copy from Mussolini's playbook.
(narrator) But despite his best efforts,
by the mid-1930s Mussolini is facing problems
that propaganda and indoctrination can't solve.
The economy is struggling,
unemployment is growing,
and discontent is starting to spread.
To help regain control,
Mussolini turns to another key tactic.
(Natasha Ezrow) Dictators often want to go to war because it's a distraction.
It's a way of uniting everybody
under some sort of nationalist banner.
It's a way of distracting from just terrible policies,
or from poor performance.
It's a way of preventing the opposition
from ever challenging the dictatorship,
because to do so they'd be viewed as being disloyal.
Mussolini was so keen to go to war,
because he wanted to unite the public under one banner,
under one nationalist agenda.
(narrator) He tells his people that the time to fulfill
the central promise of fascism has come.
It is time to build an empire.
[cheering]
But in 1935, that isn't easy.
Over the last 100 years, western powers
have colonized most of the developing world.
Now, only a handful of independent nations are left;
one is Ethiopia,
A nation Italy had tried to conquer
at the turn of the last century.
The Ethiopia question is a difficult one.
He's certainly trying to create an empire,
but remember that Ethiopia only 40 years before
had defeated the Italian Army in Adwa, in 1896.
So some of this was about reclaiming
what he perceived to be lost honor in Italy in 1935.
[Mussolini speaks in Italian]
[extremely loud cheering]
(narrator) Nearly half a million Italian soldiers
are dispatched to Africa.
On October 3, 1935,
Italian forces invade Ethiopia.
[loud explosions]
Although hopelessly outgunned,
the Ethiopians put up a fierce resistance.
Anticipating a quick military victory,
Mussolini instead has his nose bloodied.
(Marla Stone) I think there was a fantasy
when Mussolini began the war
that it would be a quick, short war, and it wasn't.
So they turn to a tactic
of total war once they met resistance.
They turn to chemical weapons,
which had been banned after the First World War.
[loud whistling & explosion]
(narrator) Mussolini orders his generals to burn Ethiopian villages
and to use poison gas on civilians.
More than 300 tons of deadly mustard gas
is deployed against civilian targets.
We're talking about air attacks against Red Cross trucks,
poison gas.
Really breaking all manner of Geneva conventions.
(narrator) While the international community condemns his methods,
it does nothing to stop the carnage.
May 5, 1936...
after 7 months of bitter fighting,
Mussolini declares victory in the name of fascism.
He proudly announces the birth of a new Roman Empire.
[Mussolini speaks in Italian]
[extremely loud cheering]
(narrator) The dictator gets his empire, but the cost is high.
More than 1,000 Italian soldiers are killed or wounded,
and the fighting claims the lives
of more than 400,000 Ethiopians.
While Mussolini's invasion is denounced by the world,
it is applauded by Adolf Hitler.
Emboldened by Mussolini's brazen act, and the fact
that the western democracies did nothing to stop it,
Hitler launches his own bid to forge an empire.
March 13th, 1938,
Hitler's forces annex nearby Austria,
followed by Czechoslovakia just 12 months later.
Then on September 1, 1939,
Adolf Hitler invades Poland, triggering World War II.
It is a move that will have titanic consequences
for Mussolini... and the entire world.
Mussolini really believes that the Nazi's are going to be
on the winning side and there's going to be
a Nazi-fascist new order in Europe.
And he sees how quickly the German blitzkrieg is working.
(narrator) Mussolini sees opportunity.
He's long dreamed of making Italy
the supreme power in the Mediterranean,
and the war gives him the chance to make it a reality.
But his generals warn Mussolini
that his army is in no shape for war.
The Ethiopian campaign gutted the treasury
and many soldiers now lack proper uniforms,
let alone modern weapons.
So there are concerns in the fascist hierarchy
about the preparation of the Italian military.
There are people in the fascist hierarchy
who don't want to fight the war on the side of the Nazis.
There's a real split.
[Mussolini speaks in Italian]
[loud cheering]
[extremely loud cheering]
(narrator) June, 1940, Mussolini declares war on Britain and France.
Intent on controlling the Mediterranean,
he launches a 2-front war--
His troops swarm into Egypt to seize the Suez canal.
Then they strike at Greece.
But the Greek Army pushes back,
and soon has the Italians on the defensive.
As his generals predicted,
Italy is woefully unprepared
for battle against fully-equipped adversaries.
More than 150,000 Italians
are killed or wounded in the fighting.
And it's even worse in North Africa.
In October 1942, the Italian forces are all but wiped out.
(Matthew Feldman) They keep getting defeated in the war, they're
defeated in Greece, they're defeated in North Africa,
and so the military might of Italy
is seen very quickly to be a straw man,
(narrator) But the worst is still to come...
July 10, 1943...
After pushing Hitler and Mussolini's forces
out of north Africa, the Allies launch an invasion of Italy.
150,000 Allied troops storm the island of Sicily.
Tired of Mussolini and his wars,
many of his own people welcome the invaders as liberators.
Il Duce all but vanishes from the public eye.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) Mussolini, who was omnipresent for all these decades,
he disappears from public life.
He doesn't make as many radio addresses,
he's not seen in public,
perhaps it's not safe for him to come out anymore.
(narrator) Furious with his bungling of the war,
top ranking military officials and fascists
meet with the King to plan Il Duce's downfall.
There was a realization that Italy was lost.
That Italy's power wasn't anywhere near
what the propaganda said it was,
and I think that once the Fascist Council of Deputies
realized that the war was imminently
reaching Italian shores, that it was all over for Mussolini.
(narrator) Unaware of the planned coup, Mussolini is invited
to meet with the Fascist Grand Council,
his top ranking advisors.
They take a vote on whether Mussolini should
continue to rule, Mussolini loses the vote,
I think he was absolutely shocked.
I think he couldn't have imagined that.
(narrator) Without the support of the military,
he is powerless to stop the plot.
The elites turned on Mussolini
because he was running the country into the ground.
The war effort was going really really poorly, and he was
making mistake after mistake after mistake.
(Marla Stone) The king has him put under house arrest,
and then sent to a military hospital in Gran Sasso.
(narrator) Mussolini is kept under guard high atop a mountain,
but he is not utterly abandoned.
He has one ally left, and he's a big one.
On Sept 9, Hitler learns that the Allies
have launched an invasion of the Italian mainland.
He sends several divisions of soldiers into Italy
to guard the southern approaches to Germany.
Then Hitler launches one of the most daring rescues of the war.
He sends an elite squad of commandos
to free Mussolini from a mountaintop prison.
After landing their gliders,
they surprise Mussolini's captors
and rescue him without firing a shot.
After Mussolini's rescued by these SS Troops,
he arrives at Hitler's headquarters
and the first thing he says allegedly is,
I'm here to receive my orders,
and I think that that very clearly
delineates the relationship, the changed relationship,
between Hitler and Mussolini.
The pupil was no longer the tutor,
and Mussolini had no cards to play
Hitler installs Mussolini as the leader
of the large swath of territory now under German control.
The once-great dictator is now Hitler's puppet.
And as the Allies continue to push north,
Mussolini can only make a pretense of authority.
But Mussolini's time as Hitler's pawn is short-lived.
As the Allies advance from the south,
and anti-fascist partisans take control
of villages to the north, his puppet state collapses.
Mussolini and Clara Petacci,
his mistress for the last 10 years,
must flee or be captured.
(Matthew Feldman) This was a broken man.
He thinks about going to Switzerland.
He thinks about giving himself up,
either to the allies or the partisans, ultimately
they decide on trying to kind of sneak into Austria.
(narrator) April 28th, 1945.
With the German army now in retreat, Mussolini and Petacci
make a desperate run for the Austrian border.
Their truck is stopped near Lake Como.
Although he is disguised as a soldier,
the most familiar face in Italy does not go unnoticed.
Ultimately caught by a group of partisans
who recognizes Mussolini in an overcoat
and Austrian military uniform,
(narrator) The partisans set up an impromptu court.
And after finding Mussolini guilty of treason,
they condemn him to death by firing squad.
Mussolini's corpse is then brought to Milan,
and placed in front of a jeering mob.
(Matthew Feldman) The body of Mussolini,
Clara Petacci, and a number of the other leaders,
the real extremists, the real hard core,
are hung up in a Milanese petrol station
for the mob to laugh at.
(Marla Stone) And they hung him upside down because in Ancient Rome,
traitors were hung upside down.
His body was left there for a number of days
until some American GI's showed up in a jeep
and cut the bodies down.
(narrator) Almost 25 years after it began,
Mussolini's fascist revolution
has reached its bloody conclusion.
In the aftermath of the war, the Italian people
turn their back on his ideology of violence
and create a democratic republic that is now its 7th decade.
But Mussolini has not been forgotten.
Almost 70 years after his downfall,
his home village of Predappio
is a destination for neo-fascist pilgrims.
(Marla Stone) There are people in Italy
who really look back on the fascist period fondly
as a time of law and order, as a time of national grandeur,
as a time when things worked.
For many Italians it was a period of of Italian greatness
in which Italy had respect in the world.
[men chanting]
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) Fascism has come back
into having an attraction for people because in some ways
we're going through a moment
that is not dissimilar to post-World War I.
There's a lot of economic anxiety.
There's worries above all about demographic shifts,
there are worries about mobile populations.
In this case, immigrants are the new enemy.
(Matthew Feldman) People are starting to remember
the way Mussolini tried to make Italy great again.
Forgetting all the horrors that had befallen Italy,
both as a result of his rule, and immediately thereafter.
(Ruth Ben-Ghiat) We forget Mussolini at our peril today
because many of the signs and symptoms of fascism are back.
The desire for a strongman, the rising racism,
the need for scapegoats, the
disaffection with traditional forms of government--
all of this is coming back,
and we need to remember the lesson of the strongman
which is tyranny and hatred.
Next time on "The Dictator's Playbook."
Noriega's a dictator, Noriega's a drug trafficker,
Noriega is repressing freedoms.
A gangster in a military uniform.
(Mariam Mufti) Noriega was a double agent, he was exchanging information
between the U.S. intelligence, the Cuban intelligence.
He played a very high-stakes game
He defied the U.S. government.
(Pres. George H.W. Bush) In Panama, we will not let American's lives
be put at risk by a dictator down there.
[orchestra plays in minor tones]
(man) To order "The Dictator's Playbook" on DVD,
visit shopPBS.org
or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
This program is also available
on Amazon Prime Video.
[synthesizer fanfare]