Fascism

Italian Fascist scouts meet a member of the Hitler Youth in Padua, October 1940: a picture explained by Roger Hudson.

Carole Chapman argues that Britain’s refusal to play the role assigned to her by the Führer had a vital impact on Hitler’s strategy.

Seventy-five years on, the Battle of Cable Street still holds a proud place in anti-fascist memory, considered a decisive victory against the far right. In fact, the event boosted domestic fascism and antisemitism and made life far more unpleasant for its Jewish victims, explains Daniel Tilles.

The idea that the German foreign office during the Nazi period was a stronghold of traditional, aristocratic values is no longer tenable according to recent research, as Markus Bauer reports.

On July 25th, 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III said to Mussolini: 'My dear Duce, my soldiers don't want to fight anymore. At this moment you are the most hated man in Italy.' Mussolini was forced to resign. Here, Alfio Bernabei reveals evidence of an unknown London-based plot to kill the dictator in the early 1930s.

The 50th anniversary of the trial and execution of the Final Solution’s master bureaucrat has inspired a number of books, exhibitions and films. David Cesarani assesses their contribution to our understanding of both the event and the man.

Adolf Hitler was born in Austria on April 20th, 1889. In this article, 'Makers of the Twentieth Century: Hitler', from our 1980 archive, Jeremy Noakes argues that Hitler's contribution to the history of the twentieth century has been one of destruction. The war he started in 1939 was to recast the pattern of our world irreparably.

Stephen Gundle, joint curator of a current exhibition on anti-Fascist art and the decline of the cult of Mussolini, examines the political demise and commercial rebirth of the Italian dictator.

Kathryn Hadley joins a group of schoolteachers and police officers in an innovative project that seeks ways to better understand the Holocaust.

As the daily life of Berlin's Jews became even more difficult under the Nazi regime, rumour and hearsay grew about the fate of those 'evacuated' to the east. How much, asks Roger Moorhouse, did ordinary Berliners know about the fate of their neighbours and was the Holocaust literally unimaginable to the German capital's ordinary citizens, Gentile or Jew?

The modern Olympic movement was inspired by the classical world. But, says Richard Bosworth, when the Italian capital hosted the Games 50 years ago, the organisers had to offer an image of the city that also took account of its Christian, Renaissance and Fascist pasts.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, France was riven by political division as extremes of left and right vied for power. Annette Finley-Croswhite and Gayle K. Brunelle tell the tragic and mysterious story of Laetitia Toureaux, a young woman swept up in the violent passions of the time.

Russell Tarr sees similarities but also important contrasts in the foreign policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy