Conditions Enabling the Rise of Dictators

The three dictatorships

Germany: Adolf Hitler and the Nazis succeeding the Weimar Republic; Italy: Benito Mussolini of the National Fascist Party succeeding the Italian Liberal Party; Austria: Engelbert Dollfuss of the Fatherland Front overthrowing the First Republic

Treaty grievances: Germany

Article 2 and Article 1 of the NSDAP, and the treaty seen as a diktat - dictators offered to restore a lost sense of glory

Treaty grievances: Italy

Vittorio Orlando lost the PM role from the unsatisfied Treaty of London; "Never has peace left behind such a wake of resentment and hatred."; Mussolini offered the rebirth of Roman glory (palingenesis)

Treaty grievances: Austria

Head of State Karl Seitz criticised the Republic's signing of a "totally destructive peace", losing about 60% of its land with the independence of Poland and Ukraine

Ineffective government: Germany

Hitler promised "work and bread"; the Anti-Young campaign (1929) emphasised the failure of Chancellor Bruning - "the hunger chancellor" - to find a solution (e.g. trying to raise taxes and use wage cuts)

Fear of communism: Germany

The 1918 Spartacist revolt won the Nazis the support of industrialists such as Schacht and Gustav Krupp in fear of a KPD revolution

Ineffective government: Italy

The lira was 1/6 of its 1913 value in 1920, with 2 million unemployed; Mussolini promised to end the Biennio Rosso - 2 years of labour strikes under the Liberal Government where socialist factory councils (equivalent to Russia's Soviets) formed

Ineffective government: Austria

By 1933 unemployment was 25% after losing the industrial region of Bohemia to Czechoslovakia, radicalising Austria into the Viennese urban Social Democrats and the Christian Social Party, who didn't agree on economic policy

Societal fragmentation: Germany

1930s KPD and SPD street clashes, with the propaganda of Horst Wessel

Societal fragmentation: Italy

Blackshirts attacked the left in 1920; later 30,000 planned to march on Rome, leading King Emmanuel III to make Mussolini PM

Societal fragmentation: Austria

Military clashes between the Schutzbund (socialists) and Heimwehr (conservatives) gave Dollfuss reason to suspend parliament in 1933

HOWEVER: racial science

Austria focused on Catholic conservatism rather than racial hierarchy; the racial states drew on Charles Darwin's 19th century theory of natural selection and Alexis Carrel's Man the Unknown (1935) on the "strains endowed with more endurance, courage, intelligence"