HITLER WAS A FORCE OF NATURE because potential counterforces allowed him to be. For years he had been seeking an audience with one of his idols, Benito Mussolini, who had been handed power after a colossal bluff, the March on Rome, in 1922. Finally, in 1934, after the Führer, too, had been handed power—also by traditional conservatives wary of leftist revolution and desperate for an authoritarian mass base—the duce condescended to a meeting. Afterward, Mussolini reassured an Italian Jewish leader, “I know Mr. Hitler. He is an imbecile and a scoundrel; an endless talker.” The duce added, “In the future there will be no remaining trace of Hitler while the Jews will still be a great people. . . . Mr. Hitler is a joke that will last only a few years.”3 On July 25, 1934, advantageously misconstruing a question that had been posed by Mussolini (who had conducted the conversation in his atrocious German), Hitler and his overzealous minions had colluded with Austrian Nazis in a putsch against Mussolini’s friend the Austrian authoritarian leader Engelbert Dollfuss.4 Even as his wife and family were guests of Mussolini’s at his seaside villa in Riccione, Italy, the Austrian chancellor—known as the Jockey for his five-foot-two height—was slowly, agonizingly bleeding to death on his office couch in Vienna. An enraged duce mobilized 100,000 troops on the Brenner Pass to support the Austrian armed forces—and Hitler backed down. “If this group of criminals and pederasts should take over Europe,” the duce fumed, “it would mean the end of our civilization.”5
Mussolini had demonstrated that Hitler could be deterred. In the meantime, the Italian fascist had switched sides, because of his expansionism in Africa in 1935 and the next year’s outbreak of the Spanish civil war, when the duce and the Führer found common cause supporting Franco.6 On November 1, 1936, during a bombastic outburst in Milan, Mussolini had mused that a Rome-Berlin “Axis” had formed, around which all of Europe would be “reorganized.” The British cartoonist David Low called Mussolini “the man who took the lid off.”7 Hitler and Mussolini became a corrosive duo, but hardly genuinely committed allies. Following a duce state visit to Berlin in September 1937, according to Albert Speer, Hitler pantomimed him. “His chin thrust forward, his legs spread, and his right hand jammed on his hip, Hitler, who spoke no foreign languages, bellowed Italian or Italian-sounding words like
Most contemporary statesmen assumed that great powers acted out of self-interest, that international discord was the norm, that peace was provided for by balance of power, and that the overturning of the balance (or equilibrium) would bring consequences that even anti-status-quo (or revisionist) powers failed to foresee.11 Here was the rub, however: the Versailles order had not been a genuine equilibrium. The treaty had been possible solely because of an anomaly in 1919: the simultaneous collapse of both German and Russian power. One or the other of these big countries was certain to come back strongly. In the event, both rose to be major military powers, and within a single generation. As if that were not enough, the old Habsburg buffer was gone. The revived Polish state and expanded Greater Romania exacerbated the instability with their barbed rivalries with, respectively, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Lack of resolve on the part of the Western powers was in many ways a symptom, not a cause, of the death rattle of Versailles. Stalin, for his part, hardly objected to Versailles revisionism—the Bolsheviks had not even been invited to the peace conference—provided, of course, that any “new order” did not come at Soviet expense.12 Versailles’s obsolescence offered extraordinarily fertile ground for Hitler’s appetites and, in his wake, for Stalin’s opportunism.