Mussolini promised to make Italy unfathomably rich, but economics was a second arena where he failed to shine. He thought a great country required a robust currency and so pegged the lira to the dollar, causing an abrupt increase in public debt, a problem made worse by his failure to understand how interest rates worked. He promoted the idea of national self-sufficiency without ever grasping how unrealistic that ambition had become. He sought to bring labor and management together but ended up creating a haphazardly organized and inefficient corporate state. He emphasized wheat production when prices were low while neglecting other crops that would have yielded more revenue. These errors might have been avoided had he appointed good advisers and heeded their counsel. Instead he discouraged his cabinet from proposing any idea that might cause him to doubt his instincts, which were, he insisted, always right. He told a gathering of intellectuals, “Only one person in Italy is infallible,” and said to a reporter, “Often, I would like to be wrong, but so far it has never happened.”
As the 1930s wore on, the new Roman empire, the Fascist empire, was beginning to fray. As a circus master, Mussolini was still without peer, but Italy lacked the resources—and he the strategic prowess—to transform the political map of Europe. Not so Adolf Hitler.
Three
“We Want to Be Barbarians”
Heidelberg, Germany: That night at the Inn, I noticed that a lint-haired young man at the next table was fixing me with an icy gleam…. He suddenly rose with a stumble, came over, and said: “So? Ein Engländer?” with a sardonic smile. “Wunderbar!” Then his face changed to a mask of hate. Why had we stolen Germany’s colonies? Why shouldn’t Germany have a fleet and a proper army? Did I think Germany was going to take orders from a country run by the Jews? A catalogue of accusation followed, not very loud, but clearly and intensely articulated. His face, which was almost touching mine, raked me with long blasts of schnapps-breath. “Adolf Hitler will change all that,” he ended. “Perhaps you’ve heard the name?”
ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 23, 1933, AN ENORMOUS BANNER stretched across the front wall of the Kroll Opera House, in Berlin. At its center was a giant swastika, symbol of the Nazis.[3] The Opera House was the temporary home of the Reichstag, the German parliament, whose permanent headquarters had been ravaged by arson four weeks earlier. Approaching the lectern was the country’s new chancellor, an Austrian by birth, who on January 30 had assumed power not via popular acclaim but because he commanded the most violent gangs and had Communists for enemies. The building in which he was about to speak was guarded on the outside by Heinrich Himmler’s secret police and on the inside by the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi paramilitary force, already larger than the German army.
Adolf Hitler spoke quietly, in a soothing tone. The forty-three-year-old appealed to the legislators for their trust, hoping that they would not think too hard before voting themselves into oblivion. His goal was to secure approval of a law authorizing him to ignore the constitution, bypass the Reichstag, and govern by decree. He assured his listeners that they had nothing to worry about; his party had no intention of undermining German institutions. Should they pass the law, the parliament would remain intact, freedom of speech would be unhindered, the rights of the Church would not be altered, and Christian values would, as ever, still be cherished. The powers requested under the “Law for Removing the Distress of the People and Reich” would be used only to shield the country from its adversaries. There was no need for concern: legislators could count on the Nazis to act in good faith.
The chancellor sat down so that the leaders of other parties could have their say. One by one, the Catholics, conservatives, and centrists fell in line and slipped Hitler’s bit between their teeth. Only the spokesman for the Social Democrats resisted, saying that to be defenseless did not mean to be without honor. Hitler, no longer the conciliator, stormed back to the rostrum. “I do not want your votes,” he screamed at the Socialists. “The star of Germany is in the ascendant, yours is about to disappear, your death knell has sounded.”
The legislators cast their votes, approving the Enabling Law by a wide margin. Within weeks, the compliant political parties were abolished and the Socialists put under arrest. The Third Reich had begun.
ADOLF HITLER WAS BORN ON APRIL 20, 1889, IN RURAL BRAUNAU, near the frontier between Austria and Bavaria. The son of a minor civil servant and an indulgent mother, he developed into a mediocre student, described by a teacher as “cantankerous, willful, arrogant, and… lazy.” Leaving school at sixteen, he embarked on what seemed an unpromising career, filling sketchbooks with architectural drawings, falling in love with Wagnerian opera, and applying without success to prestigious art schools. He spent his early twenties bedding down in a men’s hostel in Vienna, doing odd jobs, selling small paintings for modest sums, and reading prolifically. To an observer, the young man might have appeared unattractive, malnourished, ill-housed, underemployed, and without close friends; but in his own eyes Hitler was one of the elect, a superior being. His acquaintances found him full of unrealistic ideas, passionate about politics, and almost always livid about the folly of others. He scorned the laboring class for swallowing the bromides of Socialists and priests. He vilified the Reichstag for doing nothing in the face of dire threats to the nation, and he embraced theories—then widespread—about the evildoing and monstrous conspiracies of Jews.
Hitler, at twenty-five, welcomed the start of World War I. He enlisted in the Bavarian Army, saw combat at the outset, then, for four years, served as a courier between the regimental headquarters and the front lines. Unlike many soldiers, he did not complain about the war, which he considered an opportunity for the German people to show their mettle. In October 1916 he suffered a leg injury, but he returned to duty in the spring and was promoted to lance corporal. In the summer of 1918, he was exposed to a gas attack that temporarily blinded him.
His sight returned in November, but with it came the shock of Germany’s defeat. The government in Berlin had, until that final autumn, spoken only of victory and the rich rewards an end to the conflict would bring. Instead the silencing of the guns had been accompanied by the dishonor of surrender and so, also, the victors’ demand for blood money, the loss of territory, and the dissolution of the imperial regime. To Hitler and many other soldiers, this startling and humiliating outcome was not something they could accept. The war had reduced the ranks of German men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two by a numbing 35 percent. The fighting and economic deprivation pulverized the nation. In the minds of enraged survivors, the cause of their disgrace had nothing to do with events on the battlefield: Germany had been betrayed, they told themselves, by a treasonous cabal of greedy bureaucrats, Bolsheviks, bankers, and Jews.
3
In 1920, the Nazis had adopted the swastika, or