McDonald Room, Menzies Library, ANU

The relationship between Mussolini and Hitler before 1933

Dr Christian Goeschel, School of History, ANU

What was the relationship between Mussolini and Hitler, the leaders of the world’s first and most significant manifestations of fascism? Leaving aside the increasingly self-referential debate on OEgeneric fascism, recent historiography has focused very heavily on the Third Reich as a unique form of a racial state which cannot be compared to any other regime. Likewise, in Italy, most historians see Mussolini’s Fascism as a phenomenon that was unique to Italy.

I argue that we need to study these two most significant manifestations of fascism together and pay close attention to the changing dynamic of this relationship. Without the template of Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship, Hitler and the Nazis would not have come to power in 1933. I advocate a new methodology that brings together comparative history with transfer history. This approach allows us to reintegrate the history of Nazism and Italian Fascism into the wider European context.

Dr Christian Goeschel teaches Twentieth-Century European History in the School of History, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.  His chief publications include Suicide in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2009) (translated into German as Selbstmord im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011), The Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-1939: A Documentary History (Nebraska University Press, 2012), together with Nikolaus Wachsmann and Before Auschwitz: New Approaches to the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-1939, special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History, 45 (3) (2010), co-edited with Nikolaus Wachsmann.

ALL WELCOME
Please direct enquiries to Kynan.Gentry@anu.edu.au