A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Germany and Italy. Prussia under the Hohenzollerns had been a dictator state, but at least the police
and the army were as sternly disciplined as everyone else, and liable to even stricter penalties. In
Germany and Italy, any stupid bully who wanted to put on a uniform could become a minor
dictator. In effect, it was a deliberate encouragement of the criminal element. Hitler had destroyed
Roehm because Roehm wanted to ‘continue the revolution’ and increase the power of the storm
troopers. But the increasing power of the Nazi party constituted the same pressure. A healthy army
demands to be allowed to fight. In Italy, Mussolini found himself under the same pressure when
there was a clash between Italian and Abyssinian troops in December 1934. Thirty-eight years
earlier, the Abyssinians had wiped out 20,000 Italian soldiers at the battle of Aduwa. The new
incident outraged Italian national pride. And Mussolini, subject to the ‘law of expansion’ that
applies to all successful dictators, was not unwilling to court popularity with a successful war. In
October 1935, his troops marched from Italian Somaliland into Abyssinia, and took Aduwa. By
May of the following year they had taken Addis Ababa, and the Italian government proclaimed that
Abyssinia now belonged to Italy.
Spain, perhaps the most tradition-bound country in Europe, was also undergoing political
convulsions. The history of Spain in the first years of the twentieth century reads very much like
the history of Russia in the same period: a rigid class structure, a monarchy used to absolute power,
a half-starved peasantry, and a steadily growing revolutionary movement. Spain stayed out of the
First World War, but its armaments industry grew, and so did the power of the workers. In 1921, a
Spanish army was trapped in Morocco and 12,000 were killed. Widespread unrest followed, which
was terminated when General Primo de Rivera seized power in a coup. Rivera became dictator,
with the approval of the king, Alphonso XIII (who introduced him to the king of Italy as ‘My
Mussolini’). But even a dictator could not hold Spain together; Rivera resigned in 1930, unrest
broke out again, and in 1931 the king fled. When a Republican (i.e. liberal communist) government
took over, the peasants considered this as an invitation to seize the land from the landowners, and
nothing the government did could restrain them for long. They had the bit between their teeth. It
was a situation that seems to be recurrent in history. Like the slaves who revolted against Rome
under Spartacus, the peasants declined all restraint. The landowners, understandably, objected to
being plundered, and turned to the army for help. In 1936, there was an army rebellion, from which
General Francisco Franco emerged as the leader. A bloody civil war followed, and continued until
March 1939, when Franco became dictator. The war cost three-quarters of a million lives.
In Hitler’s Germany, the newly awakened national pride was demanding satisfaction for past
humiliations - in this case the losses of German territory suffered at the end of the war; these
included the Rhineland, Alsace and the ‘Polish corridor’. But the first objective of the Nazis was to
unite Germany and Austria. There was a flourishing Nazi party in Austria; it seemed absurd that
this German-speaking country, now no longer the heart of an empire, should remain a separate
entity. In July 1934, a group of Nazis in Vienna engineered a coup and killed the Austrian
chancellor Dollfuss. But at this stage Mussolini had no desire to see the collapse of a ‘buffer state’
between Italy and Germany and moved troops to the frontier; so did Yugoslavia. Hitler quickly
disowned the coup and temporarily abandoned his plans for Austria. But the incident made him
aware of the need for a stronger army; in the following year, in violation of the peace treaty, he
reintroduced conscription. In March 1936, he took his first major gamble and ordered his troops
into the Rhineland. His generals were nervous; the German army was only 20,000 strong, and if the
French had retaliated, they would have been forced to withdraw. But the French did nothing. In
November 1936, Hitler signed an anti-communist pact with Japan, and recognised the rebel