ABSTRACT
On 29 October 1922 Benito Mussolini at 39 years of age became the youngest prime minister in the brief history of united Italy. Just over ten years later on 30 January 1933, Hitler at age 44 also assumed office. Because they came to power by means of coalitions with the conservative political class, the basic political situation for both leaders was similar. However, the Nazi consolidation of power was compressed into a much shorter period of time. Two things account for this. First, as Tim Mason noted, the National Socialists had developed much further as a mass movement and therefore Hitler held a stronger position vis-à-vis his conservative allies. In 1922 Mussolini’s party, though it was a substantial fighting force in the North and Centre, controlled but a small faction in parliament; the PNF had not penetrated in much of the South, and the conservative institutional structure was extremely strong. The Italian Statuto dating from 1848 was still in force and no case had been made for its total abandonment in order to return to strong government. Hitler had both the Italian and the Bolshevik models to draw upon in setting up a single party state, whereas Mussolini had been moving in uncharted waters with allies who were not at all convinced that the parliamentary system needed to be destroyed. In Germany, not only were the conservatives politically weaker, but they were less committed to the survival of the recently created Weimar constitution. Second, Germany still had a large and potentially powerful left-wing organizational structure. While the German Social Democrats had been marginalized in parliament, both the Socialists and the rapidly growing Communists still had their organizations largely in place.
