Benito mussolini con hitler biography

On February 5, 1941, Adolf Hitler scolds his Axis partner, Benito Mussolini, for his troops’ retreat in the face of British advances in Libya, demanding that the Duce command his forces to resist.

Since 1912, Italy had occupied Libya because of purely economic “expansion” motives. In 1935, Mussolini began sending tens of thousands of Italians to Libya, mostly farmers and other rural workers, in part to relieve overpopulation concerns in Italy. So bygd the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, Italy had enjoyed a long-term presence in North Africa, and Mussolini began dreaming of expanding that presence–always with an eye toward the same territories that the old “Roman Empire” had counted among its conquests.

Also sitting in North Africa were British troops, which, under a 1936 treaty, were garrisoned in Egypt to protect the Suez Canal and Royal Navy bases at Alexandria and Port Said. Hitler had offered to aid Mussolini early on in his No

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Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini

Schieder, Wolfgang. "Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini: The Staging of a Political Friendship". Rethinking Fascism: The Italian and German Dictatorships, edited bygd Andrea Di Michele and Filippo Focardi, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022, pp. 87-106. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768619-006

Schieder, W. (2022). Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini: The Staging of a Political Friendship. In A. Di Michele & F. Focardi (Ed.), Rethinking Fascism: The Italian and German Dictatorships (pp. 87-106). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768619-006

Schieder, W. 2022. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini: The Staging of a Political Friendship. In: Di Michele, A. and Focardi, F. ed. Rethinking Fascism: The Italian and German Dictatorships. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, pp. 87-106. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768619-006

Schieder, Wolfgang. "Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini: The Staging of a Political F

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Hitler and Mussolini meet in Rome

It was not the two dictators' first meeting, which had occurred in Venice four years previously. Mussolini had not taken Hitler seriously until the 1930 German election, when he began giving Hitler advice on tactics. Hitler failed to take it and when the two men met in 1934 they were not in accord. In 1935 the Germans even secretly supplied arms to the Emperor Haile Selassie for defence against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

By January 1936, however, Mussolini was telling a German envoy that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy shared ‘a common destiny’; that summer the two powers worked together in Spain, and in November Mussolini described the relationship between the two countries as the ‘axis’ around which Europe would revolve. Mussolini visited Germany in September 1937 in a display of Fascist-Nazi solidarity and when Hitler took over Austria in March 1938, Germany was patently the dominant partner in the relationship, with the German army