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MHQ Reviews, Autumn 08

To The Threshold of Power, 1922/33, Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist Dictatorships, Volume 1 
By MacGregor Knox. 464 pp. 
Cambridge University Press, 2007

There are historians who are popularizers, whose talent with language allows them to disguise the general superficiality of their research. Then there are academic historians, whose skill and persistence in digging through archives illuminates the landscape of the past in novel ways, but whose prose dulls the importance of the story they tell. These two divisions of the profession make up the great majority of practicing historians. There is, however, a handful of historians—the Andersons, the McPhersons, the Howards—who combine both elements of historical storytelling through the diligence of their research and their skill in manipulating the language. MacGregor Knox has joined this select group with his masterful new study, To the Threshold of Power, 1922/33.

In this work, Knox examines one of the great historical quandaries of the 20th century: how did Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, in nations lying at the heart of Western civilization and renowned for their culture, education, and philosophy, manage to create two of the most monstrous and murderous tyrannies in history? Military history per se is not the main focus of this work. Nevertheless, Knox's thorough grounding in the history of war, particularly World War I, provides extraordinary insight into the driving forces behind the two movements, their leaders, and the sorry, dishonest courses that marked their rise to power.

Knox's account is also insightful because it draws on vast research and a deep understanding of the dark roots of Fascism and Nazism, which reach far back into the 19th century and, in some cases, even into the 18th century. In Italy and Germany, most historians have succumbed to the temptation to ascribe a chain of events that ended in national ruin to some temporary accident. Inevitably, contingency did play a major role—the First World War had an impact of an almost unimaginable scale on both nations, and, in Germany's case, led to hyperinflation and the Great Depression. Yet the founding of the two regimes in 1922 and 1933, and their subsequent trajectories, also owed much to citizens who wanted to restore the glory of their respective national pasts and the powerful continuities in their personnel, structure, attitudes, and myths. Why else would the two advanced capitalist countries most devastated in the Great Depression turn to leaders so different from someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

As Knox relates, the foundations of Fascism and Nazism were quite different. To a considerable extent, the roots of the former lay in the failure of Italian society to escape the binding cords of national disunity, illiteracy, and poverty. Not until the 1850s and 1860s did external events finally allow Italy to unify under an incompetent Piedmontese monarchy and an even more incompetent military.

The Germanys also endured centuries of disunity, but in their case, two of the states, Austria and Prussia, laid claim to being great powers. Then, in the course of rapid, crushing wars in 1864, 1866, and 1870, Helmuth von Moltke's general staff and Otto von Bismarck, Prussia's iron chancellor, established the united German empire. The very different courses that marked unification in the two nations reinforced the enormous differences in how Italian and German societies viewed their futures, with profound implications for what would occur in the coming century.

World War I was the seminal event in the rise to power for both Mussolini and Hitler. Knox delineates the influence of the war on the future dictators and, more important, the way it warped the worldviews held by their societies. On the Allied side, the Italian commander, Gen. Luigi Cadorna, perversely sent wave after wave of illiterate peasants and workers in impossible assaults against entrenched Austrians who were protected by barbed wire and machine guns in the innumerable battles of the Isonzo. It ended the myth that Italian soldiers could not fight, but reinforced the legends about the stupidity of their generals. To the north, the Reich's conduct in the war was marked by far greater German military effectiveness at the tactical level, but equal naïveté at the strategic level.

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