pages 41–2:

In his portrait of Mussolini, published a few days after the Fascist seizure of power, Itamar Ben Avi saw the [Fascist] government as the one which could pave Italy’s way out of a deep political crisis. According to Ben Avi, what Mussolini wanted in those days was “to impose upon Italy an iron discipline and a central authority, so it could march towards its glamorous future without any internal turmoil”.

He asserted that “the fact that in Rome, Florence, Milano, Turin, Naples and all other Italian cities Mussolini and his soldiers [sic!] were greeted as liberators and saviors in time of crisis, is probably the best evidence for the necessity of the ‘fascist’ movement in Italy at this very moment”.¹

Ben Avi also explained to his readers what the roots of that crisis were. He remarked that Mussolini’s first supporters were those “disappointed by the Italian extreme communism and Bolshevism”, the latter having already “raised its dragon‐head all over Italy”. Confronted with this dragon, Mussolini “had a real aim—rescuing young Italy from the turmoil of war and the misdeeds of extreme Bolshevism”. Pointing exactly to what he sees as a possible precedent, Ben Avi explained that the state of the Italians is

not similar to that of Germany or to England. These peoples of the South are very similar to the Russians, and without a “mighty hand” among them, a civil war would erupt among them, with all its horrors and Bolshevist terror. Mussolini aims at saving it from this possibility…²

A report by Ḥayim Vardi, Doʻar ha‐Yom’s reporter in Rome, went in a similar vein. Vardi described Italy’s internal situation as

a totally depressing one. Moscow’s emissaries do in it [Italy] as if it was their own, to their heart’s desire, and the frequent strikes—for the most ridiculous reasons—caused a terrible economic decline. Evidently, those were mostly the petits bourgeois who suffered from that, these poor horses who carry the whole kingdom’s weight on their backs, and are beaten—both by the dukes of money and by the admirers of labour.³

Pages 54 & 79:

A connection between the notion of global crisis and the assumption that fascism is a way of salvation was evident in the biography of Mussolini, written by Zwi Kolitz and published in Tel Aviv in 1936.

“Next to the socialist party… the communist devil has also began dancing among the masses of the Italian people, who were confused and divided and did not know where to go”, Kolitz described the deep political crisis which destabilised the Italian state in 1919. “Hence there was a need for a decisive force to rise in the horizon of the Apennine peninsula, and put an end to this chaos”.⁵⁸

The answer to this crisis was fascism, of course. Since “Mussolini realized, that the old diplomatic methods are worthless in modern times”, only a brand new political system was capable of pulling Italy out of the dire straits into which it fell.⁵⁹ […] For him, it was clear that “after the inferiority complex which prevailed in Italy during the last century, a necessary reaction came in this century, by Mussolini’s Fascism, which raised Italy to one of the highest levels among the peoples”.³²

Pages 99–100:

It was two weeks after the Fascist seizure of power. In a report titled “The Victory of the ‘Fascists’”, Ḥayim Vardi—a “special reporter in Rome” of the daily newspaper Doʻar ha‐Yom—wrote that Mussolini “was able to prove to the government that the fascist forces are huge, and that the majority of the people pursues this great ideal: a strong Patria, with glory and fame”.¹ Naturally, not everybody was happy with the new political deal. “The leftists”, Vardi wrote,

mourn the fact that Italy is now in the hands of the black forces, and are afraid of the beginning of a horrible period of reaction. But their fear is useless. It was neither the sinister forces nor the Black Shirts who took over, and “a horrible reaction” will never take place in Italy… In fact, it is the “proletariat” which adheres to Fascism. It is worth noting that many socialists and even anarchists turned to the winning camp after their parties were destroyed by their opponents.

Vardi had no doubt that “this internal war should not be regarded as the war of reaction against free opinion”. He explained his political diagnose by arguing that

for the last three years there were eight crises in Italy, and the government could not govern well, due to fear, favoritism and negligence. In one of his excellent speeches, Mussolini said that Italy had enough with a government which obeys the various parties; what Italy needs now is a government able to force the prevailing anarchy to obey it… There was a considerable need for a strong and confident government, a stable and frugal control. This is the reason why the fascists conquered Rome without using their weapons and armed warriors.²

In Vardi’s view, fascism was the political method which provided a cure for social disintegration and political division. It was a social and political tool enabling the Italian government to rule effectively.

Pages 110–1:

And indeed, this notion of the creation of a new social form was taking roots in the Hebrew society. “The objective historian would see the Italian fascism as the most important phenomenon of the 20th century”, wrote in Tel Aviv in 1936 the editor of the first biography of Benito Mussolini to be published in Hebrew.

In his opinion, no objective historian will deny that Italian Fascism “has the abundant treasure of national vigour, which brought a failed, subjected and suppressed people towards great deeds—deeds which made Italy one of the strongest superpowers in the world”.⁴⁴ But the publication of that book was not only for the sake of learned academic analysis. On the practical level, the editor was convinced that

there is a lesson to be taken from this Italy. Especially we, the Jews, who haven’t yet learned how to elevate the national idea to the degree of a monotheistic belief, which is the only criterion for measuring our life—must learn the wonders that the fascist movement has created, mostly in the national sphere.⁴⁵

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

1929: Oswald Mosley became the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
1934: SA leader Ernst Röhm went on leave upon learning of a potential political attack on him. Meanwhile at a large British Union of Fascists rally attended by 15,000 people—including some 2,000 Blackshirts acting as stewards—who had come to hear Oswald Mosley speak at the Olympia Stadium in London, the fascists brawled with a couple thousand communist hecklers, whom the stewards soon removed. This resulted in such awful publicity that the party lost support from many of its influential supporters, who defected away in protest of Mosley’s ever more extreme methods.
1935: The Fascist sympathizer Pierre Laval became France’s 112th Prime Minister.
1936: Cruiser Köln began operations off Spain, and Former British Prime Minister(!) David Lloyd George met with Adolf Schicklgruber at Obersalzberg, Berchtesgaden, Bavaria.
1939: Walther von Brauchitsch’s fellow anticommunists awarded him with the Sudetenland Medal with Clasp. Meanwhile, Estonian Foreign Minister Karl Selter and Latvian Foreign Minister Vilhelms Munters met with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Berlin to sign nonaggression pacts with the Third Reich.
1940: Between midnight and 0330 hours, at about ten miles north of Ireland, Fascist submarine U‐48 sank British ship Francis Massey (slaughtering thirty‐three and sinking 7,500 tons of iron ore) and damaged British ship Eros (no deaths). Then Rommel’s troops marched down the French coast toward Rouen, while Kleist’s troops were held up by French defensive lines between Amiens and Péronne.
1941: Polish physician Zygmunt Klukowski’s diary entry noted his observation of heavy Axis military traffic moving east.
1942: Axis submarine U‐107 sank Honduran ship Castilla seventy‐five miles south of the western tip of Cuba at 0408 hours, massacring twenty‐four victims to the exclusion of thirty‐five. Fifty miles north of the western tip of Cuba, U‐158 sank Panamanian ship Hermis, killing somebody but leaving forty‐six others alive. France’s Axis officials forced all Jews over the age of six to wear the Star of David. The Axis occupied Kiska, Aleutian Islands (Yankee Territory of Alaska), and Axis engineers penetrated the minefield outside of Bir Hakeim, Libya, yet the Allies repulsed this attack. Hans‐Joachim Marseille shot down the P‐40 fighter piloted by South African Lieutenant Frewen over El Adem, Libya at 1610 hours, then he shot down the P‐40 fighter piloted by South African Lieutenant Leonard James Peter Berragé. Troops of the Reich’s 11th Army began a two‐pronged assault on the city of Sevastopol in Russia, capturing Belbek at 1715 hours but also suffering 2,357 casualties. At 2224 hours, U‐159 sank Allied ship Edith two hundred miles southeast of Jamaica, killing two but leaving twenty‐nine alive.
1943: The Axis began another air offensive against Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, and Netherlandish prisoners of war transferred out of the Oflag IV‐C camp at Colditz Castle in Germany for the camp at Stanislau in Ukraine; somebody had decided in the previous month that Oflag IV‐C was to house Yankee and British prisoners only.
1944: The administration of the crematoriums in Auschwitz II‐Birkenau concentration camp ordered four sieves from the manufacturing firm Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke (DAW) to sift through human ashes. The sieves were to be equipped with an iron frame and the openings of the sieve screens were to be ten millimeters in size. Aside from that, Anglo‐Indian and Axis troops engaged in a bloody clash at Ninthoukgong, India.
1945: Kamikaze began an escort assignment for cruiser Ashigara out of Batavia, Java.