Benito Mussolini Part 4: A Fine Bromance
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It's June the 10th, 1934, just before 6pm. We're in the Stadio Nazionale, Rome. It's been another scorching day, pushing 40 degrees. And we're here, amid 55,000 sweltering fans, for the second ever World Cup final. On the lush green turf, the national team of Italy are taking on the 11 men of Czechoslovakia. The Czechs have done well. They rolled over a strong German team in the semi-final.

The Italians have navigated their way to soccer's ultimate showpiece by more unorthodox methods. The holders, Uruguay, mysteriously are not present at this tournament. Then there are the three Argentinians in the Italy side, full internationals in their home country. They've been fielded despite FIFA deeming them ineligible. In Mussolini's new Italy, rules, like opponents' legs, are there to be broken. In the quarter-final replay against Spain,

A visiting midfielder was dispatched to the hospital after just five minutes. The ten-man Spaniards in the days before substitutions limped on to inevitable defeat, though not without having two goals inexplicably disallowed. The night before Italy's semi-final with Austria, the tournament favourites, Mussolini hosted a lavish reception for the Swedish referee, Ivan Eklund. The referee paid the favour with a fine display at the match.

He personally headed away an Austrian shot inbound for the Italian goal. For the winner, scored on a mud bath pitch. Four Italians dragged the Austrian goalie over the line while he was clutching the ball. And so Italy has made it to the final, and the country has gone football crazy. With the Czechs one up, things aren't going according to Il Duce's script, and the clock is ticking down. Then in the 85th minute, the nippy outside left Raimundo Orsi

one of the Argentinians, finds the back of the net. In extra time Italy's big number nine, Angelo Schiavo, bangs in across. 2-1. The Czech strikers, kicked and manhandled, are denied several clear penalties, but they cannot call it back. The referee is Mr. Eklund again, the same official who swung Italy's semi-final. He has, in the spirit of fascist justice, assured the correct result. With the Jules Rimet Trophy deemed too puny,

A new massive fascist World Cup has been commissioned. The Coppa del Duce, a great iron monstrosity. So heavy the exhausted players can barely lift it. But who cares? Italy are world champions. A display of national prowess is a wonderful thing, knows Mussolini. For in four days time, he will be playing host to a European leader who has proved a dab hand at whipping up his own masses. A chap named Adolf Hitler. From the Neuser Network,

This is part four of the Mussolini story, and this is Real Dictators. When we left Mussolini, he had consolidated his grip on power. Italy is now a one-party state. Elections have been abolished. There is no longer a free press. Political opposition has been eliminated. Membership of the fascist party is key to professional progress. Professor John Foote,

You know, many people will put the black shirt on, wear the fascist badge, join the fascist party, because they have to. It's the only way to get a job, it's the only way to survive, it's the only way to make a living. You know, everybody in the public administration had to swear an oath of allegiance to fascism. How many of those people were actually fervent fascists is difficult to tell, but you had to, otherwise you got sacked. Meanwhile, the tentacles of the secret police, OVRA, extend into every facet of daily life.

Criticism of the regime can land you in big trouble. Losing your job is the least of your worries. Anti-fascists are condemned by a new judicial body, the Tribunal for Defense of the State, which is both judge and jury, and often executioner. Those given jail sentences, society's so-called deviant elements, are sent to fascist prison camps offshore. Professor Joshua Arthurs,

Many of the camps were located in islands off the coast and in the far south of the country. Places that today are lovely holiday spots, beautiful Mediterranean landscapes, but at the time were extremely underdeveloped. You would have hundreds of people sharing a single toilet. You had outbreaks of dysentery and other diseases. Malaria was rampant in many places.

So certainly we're not talking about death camps, but we are talking about internment camps that were pretty difficult for those confined to them. 15,000 anti-fascists are detained. Many die in captivity. Elsewhere, opponents flee the country. By 1925, there are 30,000 political exiles holed up in Paris. But even there, they must watch their backs. With official opposition firmly quashed,

All that remains is to stamp out the unofficial. In Sicily, the Mafia still runs the show. Mussolini dispatches hard man Cesare Mori to Palermo to take them on. The so-called Iron Prefect will lay siege to towns, attack women and children, and use wide-scale torture. In the battle against the mob, Mussolini too will win. Il Duce quite literally is getting away with murder.

In the early days, sheer force of personality, that of the excitable man-child, would result in his trespasses being forgiven. But the lame response to the killing of his most strident political opponent, Giacomo Matteotti, has given him license to do as he pleases. The repressive state apparatus is backed by an industrial-level propaganda machine. Professor Nicholas O'Shaughnessy,

Mussolini is a frighteningly contemporary figure. I mean, like Hitler, he understands that propaganda is not just an instrument of government, but the medium of government. And as Italy's best-known journalist, there is no one better at crafting the commands. Out in the sticks, where Italy still has a massive illiteracy problem, the wireless is becoming the preferred medium.

The regime had radios installed in every little town across the country and would project radio broadcast from loudspeakers into the piazza. This was a new technology that it saw was going to be the wave of the future. Mussolini's famed balcony speeches now double as performative art, live shows that can reach the most remote corners of the nation. All the fascists understood. The communists didn't really understand.

is the fact that most people are apolitical, very apolitical. They were then, they are now. And so if you can turn politics into entertainment, well, my goodness, you're going to win. To which Il Duce has another trick up his sleeve: cinema. A new film production center in Rome, Cinecitta, will not only rival Hollywood, Mussolini declares, but ensure a means of promoting Italian-ness and fascist values.

Interestingly, its most successful output will actually be a string of frivolous bourgeois comedies, known as white telephone movies. Pure escapism, a far cry from the turgid historical epics that Josef Goebbels is commissioning in Nazi Germany. Still, there is the education system for that. Italian history is rewritten. The Romans are presented as proto-fascists. The Renaissance, an exercise in a fascist enlightenment.

Heroes like Garibaldi and Mazzini are now fascist revolutionaries, patriots, irredentists. Mussolini assumes godlike status, even inserting himself into the nativity. Professor Helen Roche,

And people start making Rossellini into a kind of folk hero. So they say, oh, you know, he was seen going to bring succor to the inhabitants of this town on a motorbike in the night. He was going incognito. So modern folk tales about his generosity and beneficence and so on. He's part film star, part saint and part Father Christmas.

the fascist welfare organisations, they co-opted this epiphany tradition of a witch bringing presents to the children, a bit like Father Christmas, and that became the Befana del Duce. And so the children were given all of these basically care packages, but they also had slogans for Mussolini and portraits of Mussolini in that package. So that was totally bizarre.

bound up maybe in their eyes with what he was doing, his kindness, his generosity. So Mussolini becomes Father Christmas as well.

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But what exactly is fascism? We know how the party started, how it got its name, its methods. But this? This cult of devotion? This manipulation of the mind? We are in uncharted territory here.

Yeah, I think fascism is one of the most complicated words around and it's used for so many things. I think there's two things. One is the kind of specific Italian or early fascist movements. And I think the essence of that is radical nationalism born out of the First World War. So, you know, fascism is very much anti-democratic, anti-the liberal institutions, which everyone thought were radical.

set in Western Europe. But it is also a flexible, pragmatic movement. You know, it's not just an ideology. Fascist Italy is evolving into a unique state, unlike any other in history. More than that, fascism has become a brand. The Chamber of Deputies, for example, is still officially the executive of a representative democracy. But even its deputies are required to wear fascist black uniforms.

They start every day with a rendition of the Giovinetza, the fascist party anthem. On the streets, the Roman salute is now compulsory as an everyday greeting. Dr Lisa Pine: Italian fascism was kind of a bit of an inherent contradiction because on the one hand it was harking back to ancient Rome and the glory of Italy's great past and then on the other hand it was all about the future.

Mussolini is aviator, the first pilot, il primo pilota. You get thousands of postcards of him distributed all over Italy. He particularly loved posing, wearing pilot's goggles in planes, on motorbikes, in fast cars.

All of these technological marvels of modernity, which particularly in impoverished areas of Italy, you wouldn't exactly see many motor cars on the roads. But this is something incredibly aspirational. It says we're going to bring Italy kicking and screaming into the future. It's not just Il Ducey.

In 1933, Italo Balbo, appointed Minister of Aviation, completes a record-breaking flying boat voyage across the Atlantic. He's greeted with fanfare when he lands in Chicago. That same year, the ocean liner SS Rex crosses the Atlantic in just four days. You see, Italian fascists went beyond propaganda to seize a particular aesthetic.

The Nazis were retro people. It was the Austrian agrarian landscape of the 19th century, which they used as the basis of their art. It was totally, totally reactionary and moribund.

Whereas the Italian fascists just adored the idea of contemporaneity in technology, but also in art. They embraced Cubism. They embraced Vorticism. So Italy continued to produce art of a high order. This is very modern. It's exciting.

We're on the verge of a bright new soaring, extraordinary, shining world. And the art celebrated that. And of course, specifically the architecture. The ultimate, I think, symbol of that is in concrete. In Africa, the city of Esmara, which is now a World Heritage Site. It's the only Art Deco city in the world. It's an Italian fascist city in the middle of Africa.

Italy embraced technology to an extraordinary degree. They sent a flying boat to Chicago, they're winning airspeed records, and of course the cars, dare I say the name Bugatti. There's nothing like a Bugatti because it's really the only vehicle which really does synthesize high art and automotive engineering. That is a fascist Italy. Fascism is muscular, macho, the veneration of the young and the strong.

Mr.

Mussolini actually forbade journalists ever to mention, one, his birthday, because he didn't want people to think that he was aging. And two, they weren't allowed to mention that he was a grandfather, because that would also make him seem like an old man. So he was more concerned to bolster this idea that he was forever young in the service of a fascism that was a youthful movement whose anthem was literally Jobinezza.

And in case, for one fleeting moment, you forget that you're dwelling in a fascist utopia, from giant billboards, the face of Big Brother Benito leers down. Slogans were bandied about very lavishly and sort of found their way onto posters and radio broadcasts and so on. One of the key slogans was, believe, obey, fight. It all points to a society gearing up for one thing, war.

Through the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920, Italy has renounced its claims to the Dalmatian coast. Resentment over Versailles' mutilated victory will be offset slightly by the 1924 Treaty of Rome, which has, to the glee of the irredentists, handed Fiume back to Italy. But Mussolini otherwise is busy playing the internationalist, indulging the League of Nations, turning up to glad hand at conferences in London, Locarno, and Lausanne,

Ernest Hemingway, in Lausanne as a reporter with the Toronto Star, describes how Il Duce arrives on a speedboat, zooming across the lake. On going in for an interview with Mussolini, Hemingway remarks how Il Duce is posed at his desk, studiously reading a book, projecting the image of the intellectual. Unfortunately, the book is upside down. Hemingway, who has a nose for the human condition, gets what others are still learning the hard way,

that what Mussolini says and what he does are increasingly divergent things. The League of Nations is promoting equality of peoples, national self-determination, love thy neighbor. Mussolini even gives an English language broadcast to the world, proclaiming himself a man of peace. In private, however, Mussolini has no time for this flower-child hippie stuff. In Italy, all men are created equal, but some are more equal than others.

The newly acquired territory around Trieste, for example, is a melting pot of people. Italians, Slovenes, Croatians, Austrians. The Slovene cultural center is burned down. The home of an eminent Slovene lawyer is attacked. Minorities find themselves subject to black shirt intimidation and marginalization, an unofficial apartheid. Mussolini coins a term for it: "Salute della razza", ethnic cleansing.

He will also add another dark term to the lexicon: "spatio vitale" – living space.

Mussolini really showed quite a change of heart in terms of foreign affairs. So in 1911, for example, as a young socialist, he had taken part in quite a violent protest against Italy's invasion of Libya. And yet by 1915, he's advocating entrance into the First World War. And by the mid 1920s, he was strongly advocating his concept of living space and expansion at the expense of

nations that he regarded as lesser or inferior. Mussolini argues that Italy's goal should be "to join the two shores of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean into a single Italian territory." This will inevitably bring Italy into armed conflict with others. The willingness of the international order to oppose Mussolini is about to be tested. Despite the best intentions of the League, the redrawing of the map of Europe is already storing up trouble.

Since its war with Turkey in 1911, Italy has been in control of the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. The Great War, meanwhile, has seen Italy establish a quasi-protectorate over Albania. Both territories are about to lead Mussolini into a spat with a newly resurgent neighbor: Greece. On August 27th, 1923, there is a flashpoint. An Italian general surveying the Greek-Albanian border is killed, along with his aides.

It's never clear who carried out the attack, but suspicion falls conveniently on Greek nationalists. Whipped up by the fascist press, Italy goes into an anti-Greek hysteria. The cry goes up for revenge. After issuing a humiliating ultimatum to Athens, Mussolini proceeds with a bombardment and invasion of the island of Corfu. But the move does not play well.

Corfu has been serving as a refugee station for families fleeing conflict in Asia Minor. The majority of those now lying in the rubble are children. Many have injuries so horrific that a new humanitarian body, the Save the Children Fund, condemns Mussolini most strongly. Italy withdraws its forces, but only after exacting exorbitant reparations from Greece. Mussolini has at least learned one thing.

The League, would-be keeper of international peace, effectively stood aside throughout the dispute. It is, as he suspected, a toothless tiger. The battle against the decaying Ottoman Empire has also given Italy control of land across the Mediterranean. In particular, Italian North Africa, Libya. Now Mussolini is going to turn Libya into a full-on colony. It must be cleared for settlement.

From January 1923, Italy quietly steps up its land grab. When Mussolini's troops begin rounding up tribesmen and herding them into concentration camps, a resistance movement builds. It's led by a man who will become a Libyan folk hero, Omar Mukhtar. The so-called "Pacification of Libya" is a genocidal campaign, designed to exterminate as many Libyans as possible. It will be led by Marshal Pietro Badoglio,

the man incidentally who was deployed by the King to thwart Mussolini's march on Rome. How times have changed. Half of the population of the province of Sirenecca, about 100,000 people, will be systematically wiped out. Confined to just 15 ill-suited camps, most will die of starvation and disease. In 1931 the Royal Italian Air Force will complete the job with chemical attacks on tribesmen.

The war concludes soon after, with Mukhtar's capture and public hanging. Mussolini will celebrate by building a huge triumphal arch on the coast road. Loyal tribesmen will present him with their most prestigious award, the Sword of Islam. Again, just as Mussolini expected, the League of Nations twiddles its thumbs. And with the atrocities happening far away, out of sight, ordinary Italians aren't much fussed by this dirty war either.

Decades later, a young Bedouin will grow up to become an independent Libya's leader. His name is Muammar Gaddafi, and in 1973 he will have Mussolini's arch blown up. In 2009, when received by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, he will wear, pinned to his uniform, a photo of Omar Mokhtar. Italy is not the only country with a grievance over Versailles.

In Germany, the new Chancellor Adolf Hitler has been seething with victimhood. It's not just the war reparations and imposed disarmament. The redrawing of boundaries has stranded ethnic German populations outside its borders. In Czechoslovakia, in Poland, and Hitler hasn't been shy about saying so. For some time now, Mussolini's curiosity has been growing about this Hitler fellow. With those raised arms salutes and his Sieg Heilung minions,

He had started out as a Mussolini tribute act, and not even a very good one. His failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 was an attempt to rip off the March on Rome. In jail, he'd penned a book, Mein Kampf. In it, he expounded a belief that the German peoples, the Volk, should be united in a single realm. A Reich. Ethnic cleansing. Living space. Lebensraum. These are all parts of Mussolini's schtick. The man has no shame.

That said, the two have a lot in common. Both served in the Great War. Both were corporals. Both were wounded. Both were disillusioned socialists. Both are writers. Both have gone from vagrancy and prison to becoming the leaders of their nations. It's high time they met. A woman struck dead after hearing a haunting whistle. A series of childlike drawings scrawled throughout a country estate.

A prize horse wandering the moors without an owner. To the regular observer, these are merely strange anomalies. But for the master detective, Sherlock Holmes, they are the first pieces of an elaborate puzzle. I'm Hugh Bonneville. Join me every Thursday for Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. I'll be reading a selection of the super sleuths' most baffling cases, all brought to life in their original, masterful form.

Behind the scenes, feelers have already been extended between Italy and Germany. They have enemies in common. The powers who might thwart their territorial ambitions. Chief among them, France.

And there is also Yugoslavia, a new artificial creation, home of the hated Slavs, gobbler up of the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1929, on the quiet, Mussolini orders his general staff to make contingency plans for a war with both countries.

In July 1932, he cables a message to Berlin, suggesting an Italo-German alliance.

But neither yet has the military capability to take on France. And, clearly, Italy's intelligence operations aren't up to the mark either. When the French Secret Service rumbles the whole scheme, it makes one thing plain: that Mussolini can no longer be trusted. For Il Duce, it's not just about arms, munitions, intelligence. It's a numbers game. The Italian population currently stands at around 40 million.

To sustain warfare, it must reach 60 million. To this end, Italians should follow his own example: they must breed. In 1924, the fascist parliament passes a law, making even giving out information about contraception a criminal offense. In 1926, Il Duce orders women to double the number of children they're willing to bear. Slowly but surely, the population begins to grow. It's a case of making love and war.

And in this deeply macho culture, there is now only one thing missing, the third part of the Holy Trinity, football. Football in Italy has tended to be an elite amateur pastime of limited appeal. Horse racing and boxing draw the crowds. Mussolini has no interest in calcio, literally the sport of kicking. But it hasn't gone unnoticed that elsewhere, notably in Great Britain,

Football as a professional sport is attracting huge attendances. It's a game of the working classes, the masses. Professor Giulia Albanese

Mussolini is the leader of a new politics and this is very important. He is not a traditional leader. He knows that the masses are a fundamental part of new politics. And this is something that, in a way, creates the novelty of Benito Mussolini, not only in Italy, but in Europe. By the 1920s, football begins to enjoy a similar boom in the Italian regions. It presents an opportunity.

not just occasions for weekly fascist rallies, but also by reorganizing the sport into a single national structure, calcio can be used to unify the country. In 1929, a national league is organized into two divisions, Serie A and Serie B, but soccer can also be played at international level. And what better way to demonstrate the prowess of the new fascist Italy than by winning a new global competition, the World Cup.

Italy declines to send the team to the inaugural edition in Uruguay 1930. As with waging war, the country is not yet ready. Instead, they target the tournament of 1934, one they conspire to bid for, stage, and win. Alleged inducements to FIFA committee members make the right to host the Second World Cup a formality. From then on, via brown envelopes and brutal defending, the path to victory will be secure.

And they see that as a crucial way of mobilizing support for the nation and for fascism. So football becomes the biggest, with cycling, is the biggest sport in Italy. 29 Serie A, the national championship. A lot of fascists involved with clubs, leading fascists involved with clubs. And in 1934, Italy organizes the World Cup. It's the second ever World Cup. And it's organized as a fascist tournament. Moussid has no interest in football.

doesn't understand it, never played it, but reinvents himself, goes to the games, buys his own tickets with his kids. You know, classic, right? Classic family man, let's go to the game. And it's organized, you know, as a set piece. Akira Stelaccio is the brilliant spin doctor of Mussolini. Spins the whole tournament. Whether in the dressing room or orchestrating the crowds, never has a national leader been so invested in a sporting competition.

Mussolini's team talk to the Italian squad on the eve of the tournament is a stirring one. Win or that's the sound of him drawing his finger across his throat. Fortunately, the boys do the business. Italy wins so perfect. They put a lot of money in. They built more than 100 stadiums. They put a lot of money into the grassroots. You go to a stadium in Italy, many of them will still be those built under fascism. Very beautiful, often modernist stadiums.

Italy is the best team in the world. It's run by this amazing manager called Vittorio Pozzo who basically sees football as a war and sees his players as alpini, you know, alpine soldiers. He'd been a soldier in the war. Amazing manager, continues to manage after the war in a weird continuity and wins two World Cups and an Olympic tournament. So it's huge. You know, football is a religion, it's a ritual. It's June the 14th, four days after the World Cup victory.

Mussolini stands beside the grass airstrip at the Venice Lido. In the sky, a silver plane, a Junkers 52 circles. Painted on its tail is a bright red band. On it, a white roundel and a striking black swastika. Mussolini mutters to himself, when it comes to trademarks, he has to admit Hitler has got him licked. In 1926, fanboy Hitler had written to Mussolini. He wanted a signed photo.

A request Il Duce spitefully declined. It's said he still keeps a bust of Mussolini in his office. But in recent times, certainly since the last year when he became Chancellor, Hitler is fast becoming the preeminent dictator. The student is now schooling the master. That said, it's Hitler who has initiated this summit, which means he wants something. When the plane bumps to a halt and Hitler steps off,

He's wearing a crumpled, oversized raincoat and battered felt trilby. A nervous flier, he's also sweating profusely. Mussolini is one step ahead of him, tipped off as to Hitler's bedraggled condition. He quickly changes into his finest dress uniform, complete with dagger and spurs. As the military band strikes up, the underdressed Hitler appears nonplussed. The two dictators embrace. Mussolini whispers to an aide:

Ave imitator, hail imitator. They are at once an odd couple. Il Duce, barrel-chested, surrounded by festooned acolytes. Hitler, in his shabby chic. Six years Mussolini's junior. Skinny, shifty, unable to make eye contact. Still, Il Duce will do his best to make the Fuhrer feel at home. If you discount Hitler's war service on the Western Front, the 45-year-old has never before left Germany or Austria.

Mussolini will go out of his way to make this pallid, undernourished fellow gorge on Italian hospitality. Their talks will take place at the Palazzo Vendraminca Leggi, on Venice's Grand Canal. It's where Adolf's favorite composer, Richard Strauss, spent his final days. But first, Hitler must be ritually upstaged. Crumpled and perspiring, he's forced to make an inspection of an Italian army regiment, resplendent in black uniforms and gold braid.

Hitler, who gets seasick as much as he gets airsick, is then swept towards a motorboat to cut across the Venice lagoon. Mussolini stands, strident at the prow, while a green-gilled Hitler tries to hold down his vegetarian breakfast. One can only put on so much of a show. As they cruise past a row of destroyers, closer inspection reveals the flags to be sailors' underwear flapping on the line. Though Mussolini will get his own back again.

In St. Mark's Square, Hitler is forced to endure a tiresome goose-stepping parade. When eventually their two-hour sit-down takes place, the pair soon start talking across each other. As Konstantin von Neurath, the German foreign minister, will put it, the encounter resembles two mastiffs barking at one another. Later that night at the official reception, Hitler embarks on a two-hour rant, regurgitating whole passages of Mein Kampf. Mussolini sneaks away.

The first meeting between the two in Venice in June 1934 was not a great success. Both of them were posturing, both of them were clearly not very comfortable and they were kind of more concerned to outdo each other really. Mussolini spoke some German and therefore he refused to have an interpreter or a translator. Yet he had difficulty understanding Hitler's accent so it kind of wasn't going very well from the start.

Not surprisingly, he became bored by Hitler's monologues and in the end, neither was much impressed by the other at this meeting. Hitler, as Mussolini confides to an aide, is a muddled-headed fool. And what is it with this stuff about the Jews? He seems obsessed. What's been achieved by the meeting is anyone's guess. It's more a case of sniffing each other out. In Rome and Berlin, the meeting is reported as a rip-roaring diplomatic triumph.

Among the growing dictatorial brotherhood, Mussolini has struck up a friendship with someone else: the Austrian Chancellor and arch-nationalist, Engelbert Dollfuss. In July 1934, Mrs. Dollfuss and kids are guests of Rachele at the Mussolini Seaside Villa in Riccione, near Rimini. The holiday is not one to remember. On the 24th, Il Duce is at Cesena, examining plans for a psychiatric hospital.

When he receives shocking news, he telephones the villa immediately. Engelbert Dollfuss is dead. He's been assassinated by Austrian Nazis. Part of an intended coup, part of their campaign to fold Austria into the Third Reich, a proposed union known as the Anschluss. To Mussolini there is no doubt who is ultimately behind this: Adolf Hitler. Il Duccia had liked Dollfuss personally.

And he'd positioned himself as a guarantor of Austrian independence. If Hitler swallows Austria up, as now seems certain, the Third Reich will be on Italy's doorstep. That bedraggled chap for whom he'd pushed the boat out is actually a threat. I think that that relationship is obviously crucial to 20th century history. The lives of millions of people are affected by that alliance. The power in that relationship changes.

and it becomes much more that Hitler's driving that alliance. And there's always tensions there, for example, around Austria. You know, Hitler taking Austria is very problematic for Mussolini, and he's warned time and time again against getting closer to Hitler. Mussolini does an about-face. Nice Mr. Hitler is no more. He is now a mad little clown, a sexual degenerate. In September 1934, from a balcony in Bari,

Mussolini goes to town on the barbarians of old Germania. Thirty centuries of history enable us to look with majestic pity at certain doctrines taught on the other side of the Alps by the descendants of people who were wholly illiterate in the days when Rome boasted a Caesar, a Virgil, and Augustus. He promises Italian military support for Austria. He dispatches three armored divisions to the frontier.

In April 1935, at the town of Streza, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, he even hosts a conference for delegations from Britain and France. He's getting the old gang back together. They pledge to hold Germany to account from now on. The rebooted Union is known as the Streza Front. Il Duce likes this new conciliatory mood. They've got each other's backs, they promise. In which case they're hardly going to object if he does a little military adventuring of his own, right?

And what better place to start than where there is still unfinished business? Abyssinia, or as it is more often called, Ethiopia. Essentially, Mussolini wanted to create a new Roman Empire and to expand Italian power.

Rather than being confined or hemmed in by the Mediterranean, he wanted to make the Mediterranean the Italian Sea, our sea, with a view to overseas territorial expansion.

Now, at the end of the 19th century, the Italian government had aimed to take new colonial acquisitions in Africa, and it had succeeded in taking both Somaliland and Eritrea. The failure to take Ethiopia remained a thorn in the side of the Italians because it meant that Italy still felt like a lesser power. It's October the 2nd, 1935, nighttime, from the Palazzo Venezia,

Mussolini gives a rousing speech, broadcast to the nation. "It was on the shores of the Mediterranean that the great religions, the great philosophers, the great poets, and an empire were born," declares this little Caesar. "Italians all over the world, beyond the mountains and beyond the seas, listen. With Ethiopia we have been patient for forty years. That is enough now. Dawn the next day.

We're in East Africa, on the dry riverbed of the Maareb River, the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The land is hilly, parched and brown. Under a reddening sky, the early morning mist swirls between the acacia trees and clumps of coarse scrub. There are few human inhabitants along these parts, just scattered villages and nomadic goat herds. But their world is about to be turned upside down. Under Marshal Emilio de Bono,

200,000 Italian troops stand poised. At 5 am local time, according to Il Duce's explicit instruction, advance parties will cross the border. Overhead, a squadron of Caproni bombers crosses the sky. Two of the pilots are Mussolini's sons, Vittorio, 19, and Bruno, just 17. This thing is personal. Just like Libya, the invasion of Ethiopia will prove another case of total overkill, in every sense.

One of the things that the League of Nations got so incensed about was the use of poison gas, which of course was totally against the Geneva Convention. But that was all happening outside of Italy's shores and to people who were seen as of lesser worth, both by the regime and by the Western world at large, unfortunately. Up to 500 tonnes of mustard gas will be dropped.

responsible for around a third of Ethiopia's 200,000 civilian casualties. In a two-pronged attack, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani's army will push up simultaneously from Somaliland. He will wage not just war, but a campaign of extermination.

Ethiopia is an ancient Christian realm of such longevity. One of the things Mesopotamian people do is attack the Ethiopian Orthodox priests. They're seen as a source of resistance. They're brutally cut. In some parts of Ethiopia, every male over 18 is systematically executed. It is intended as a general liquidation of the native population, paving the way for future Italian replacement.

Germany was the only nation that didn't oppose Italy's invasion. In earlier years, foreign powers had been full of admiration for Mussolini, particularly for the policies he put in place domestically. Perhaps most famously, the belief that whatever else you said about Mussolini, he made the trains run on time. But this act of aggression changed that view.

Until that time, and despite Libya, Mussolini had received a huge amount of good press. In Britain, he had a vast number of admirers and followers who said, oh, well, we wouldn't recommend fascism for this country, but it's right for the Italians. These acts, however, are met with horror by the League of Nations, and not least, by Mussolini's new strays at bodies. Mussolini being Mussolini, he doubled down. It's all the League's fault.

He reels off the huge Italian casualties of the Great War and the scant rewards of Versailles. When peace was being discussed around the table of hate, only a few crumbs fell to Italy of the rich colonial booty. But on October 10th, 1935, by a vote of 50 to 1, the League resolved to take action. It will come in the form of economic sanctions. Mussolini puffs his chest out. So what?

Italy will meet sanctions with discipline, frugality and with sacrifice. The short-lived Stresa front is over. On May 5th, 1936, Italian troops enter Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. Emperor Haile Selassie flees the country. Italy, declares Mussolini, finally has its empire. Back home, 30 million people would turn out on the streets in a wild victory celebration.

It mobilizes a vast amount of people. It's quite a quick success. It gains Italy incredible economic and territorial power. Although it's condemned by the world community somewhat hypocritically, given that there was a British Empire, the German Empire, the French Empire. Not sure why Italy can't have an empire. But nonetheless, that aside, the empire was very popular. In June, when the fugitive Haile Selassie gives a speech in Geneva, appealing to the League for Justice,

Italian journalists heckle him. Although sanctions were applied, Italy's eventual success seemed to show their ineffectiveness. This diminished faith in the League of Nations and indeed in the capacity for collective security. Italy was a member of the League's council and had been an aggressor and the others had done nothing. Under Hitler, Germany left the League in 1933. Japan has done the same.

In December 1937 Italy will join the band of unholy exiles. Even the US, whose president Woodrow Wilson did so much to set the whole thing up, has yet to ratify its membership. The League's sanctions on Italy are half-hearted at best. The organization established to maintain world order has proven utterly ineffective, once more against the dictator.

It was the moment in which he recognized that there was a climate in Europe in which fascists could have space.

And in this moment, he completely changed also his attitude to foreign fascism. Until that moment, he had avoided to say that fascism was an universal phenomenon. He had said that fascism was not a product for export. And starting from 1930 and then more strongly in '32 and then '34, he started to say, "No, it is an universal phenomenon." Just as it was in 1914, the battle lines are being drawn.

And Mussolini, despite initial misgivings, is about to swipe right on a second date with Hitler.

Mussolini described Mein Kampf as boring and dull, and he thought that Hitler's ideas and theories were simplistic and coarse. Mussolini also had quite a low opinion of Hitler's rise to power, which he believed was less glorious than his own. And then what we see throughout the rest of the period, so kind of from the mid-1930s right up until the end of the war, is that eventually, though, this relationship culminates

Completely turned around, completely turned on its head. Mussolini appoints his smooth-talking son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, already a seasoned diplomat, as his new foreign minister. As a pilot in the Ethiopian war, Ciano can now dress up in uniform too, that of an Air Force captain. He's dispatched forthwith to the Berghof, Hitler's Bavarian retreat. Ciano has good news. There is something they can immediately bond over.

In Spain, another Mussolini devotee, a general called Francisco Franco, is about to lead his nationalist forces against the ruling Republicans. It's the latest chapter in the battle of black versus red. The Soviets are backing the Republicans, with Britain and France towing a non-interventionist line. Franco is appealing to both Germany and Italy to lend him their support. Hitler is sending 7,000 troops, Mussolini is informed.

in which case he, in their continuing game of one-upmanship, pledges ten times that number, including a detachment of air corps. There are still some fences to be mended. There was all that stuff about Hitler being a sexual degenerate. So Mussolini confides to the German ambassador that should Austria become a German satellite, he would no longer have any objection. On July 11th, 1936, a treaty is signed to this effect.

It will be followed by an anti-Kommerntern Pact. Mussolini and Hitler vow to stand side by side against the scourge of Bolshevism. The bromance is back on. September 28, 1937. The sun has set. We're in Berlin, the vast space of the Mayfield, part of the Olympic Stadium complex. A year ago exactly, this arena hosted the 1936 Olympiad.

Hitler recognizes, just like Mussolini, that sport can be harnessed to promote the regime. Tonight there are some 400,000 people present for the world's biggest gig: the double bill of double bills: Hitler and Mussolini. The atmosphere is electric. The stadium and surrounds are bedecked with Nazi flags and Italian tricolors.

There would be flaming torches, but the increasing rainfall is starting to fizzle them out. As the arc lights sweep, Mussolini takes to the podium, generously for Hitler. After a lengthy speech himself, he has given over the finale to his guest. Though he's probably got one eye on the sky, the heavens are about to open. Gamely with rain now lashing, Ilduce carries on, barking like a mastiff in his stilted German, soaked to the bone.

while some of the less hardy Nazis make for the exits. He will hail his host not as a sexual degenerate, but as a maker of history. Together they can do beautiful things. Britain and France are decadent and weak, but Germany, Italy, these are the new powers around which the new Europe should revolve, an axis. The words of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie addressed at the League of Nations now seem prophetic.

"What replies shall I take back to my people?" he had asked. "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow." In the next episode, at the Munich conference, Mussolini postures as a peacemaker. With Hitler in the ascendancy, the Rome-Berlin axis is upgraded to a military alliance, the Pact of Steel. High on fascist adrenaline, Il Duce invades Albania. Soon, in the backdraft of the German blitzkrieg,

He would declare war on Britain and France. That's next time. Get every episode of Real Dictators a week early and ad-free by subscribing to Noisa+. Hit the link in the episode description to find out more.