Original subtitles

[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]