Mussolini, Benito

(1883–1945)

   Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader, became prime minister of Italy in 1922 and subsequently became the country’s dictator. Although viewed by historians as a pragmatic politician who did not consider anti-Semitism politically effective in Italy, Mussolini regarded anti-Semitism as morally repugnant and alien to the Italian people. Historian Meir Michaelis quotes Mussolini as stating that “Hitler’s anti-Semitism has brought him more enemies than necessary.” Elsewhere, it is recorded that Mussolini considered Nazi racism and anti-Semitism as barbaric. In fact, Italian Jews, who consisted of 0.1 of the country’s population, played a disproportionately important role in supporting Mussolini and the growth of Italy’s fascist movement. By 1936, however, Mussolini moved closer to becoming an ally of Adolf Hitler as Nazi Germany supported Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Thus from being critical of Hitler’s early policies, Mussolini became an admirer of the Nazi leader, and emulated the Nazi Nuremberg Laws when he promulgated the Italian Racial Laws of 1938. These laws were partially imitative and partly written by Mussolini himself and were not due to pressure exerted on him by Adolf Hitler.

   A number of historians attribute these anti-Semitic measures to a trend by the fascist government toward racism, but recent revelations from the diaries of Mussolini’s mistress, Clara Petacci, present a different picture of Mussolini’s true feeling about Jews. She records him as saying, “These disgusting Jews, I must destroy them all,” and elsewhere Mussolini boasts to Petacci, “I’ve been a racist since 21.” He even boasts in words that foreshadow the coming Final Solution, “I shall carry out a massacre like the Turks did,” an illusion to the Armenian genocide in 1915. Historian Paul Corner of the University of Siena, Italy, commenting on these revelations released after more than 50 years in the Italian state archives, states, “People have always assumed the racial laws were a political instrument, not part of a policy in which he sincerely believed. This would suggest quite the opposite.”