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 ItalyThe Rise and Fall of MussoliniItaly declared its neutrality upon the outbreak
of World War I on the grounds that Germany had embarked upon an offensive
war. In 1915, Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies but obtained
less territory than it expected in the postwar settlement. Benito
(“Il Duce”) Mussolini, a former Socialist, organized
discontented Italians in 1919 into the Fascist Party to “rescue
Italy from Bolshevism.” He led his Black Shirts in a march on Rome
and, on Oct. 28, 1922, became prime minister. He transformed Italy into a
dictatorship, embarking on an expansionist foreign policy with the
invasion and annexation of Ethiopia in 1935 and allying himself with Adolf
Hitler in the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936. When the Allies invaded Italy in
1943, Mussolini's dictatorship collapsed; he was executed by partisans on
April 28, 1945, at Dongo on Lake Como. Following the armistice with the
Allies (Sept. 3, 1943), Italy joined the war against Germany as a
cobelligerent. A June 1946 plebiscite rejected monarchy and a republic was
proclaimed. The peace treaty of Sept. 15, 1947, required Italian
renunciation of all claims in Ethiopia and Greece and the cession of the
Dodecanese islands to Greece and of five small Alpine areas to France. The
Trieste area west of the new Yugoslav territory was made a free territory
(until 1954, when the city and a 90-square-mile zone were transferred to
Italy and the rest to Yugoslavia).
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