Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini:
(Predappio, 29 July 1883 – Giulino di Mezzegra, 28 April 1945).
Italian politician, journalist and schoolteacher. He was Prime Minister of Italy from 1922 to 1943. Following the March on Rome in October 1922, Mussolini came to power and turned Italy into a fascist state.
The truth is that men are tired of liberty.
Germany is made up of different races, more or less happily mixed, as anyone traveling through Germany can see. We’ll see if Nazism manages to get out of it a “herd” of pure blood.
1. A factual observation: Germany is populated by people of mixed ancestry — something that is historically accurate and which he even implicitly regards as something positive or neutral.
2. A mocking doubt: he sarcastically wonders whether Nazism will succeed at all in fabricating a homogeneous “herd” of “racially pure” blood from that varied population. The word ‘herd’ (‘armento’ in Italian, literally: livestock) is strikingly chosen — it sounds derogatory, as if he is comparing the Nazi ideal to the breeding of cattle.
Context: The quote dates from the early 1930s, a period in which Mussolini still openly distanced himself from Hitler’s racial ideology. In 1932, in an interview with Emil Ludwig, later published as “Gespräche mit Mussolini”/ “Talks with Mussolini”, Mussolini ridiculed the Nazi racial doctrine and stated that “pure races” no longer existed and that “race” is “95 percent feeling” and not a biological reality. The strength and beauty of a nation often arose from “happy mixing”. Historical irony: Meanwhile, Mussolini’s criticism of National Socialist racial doctrine was not without a healthy dose of opportunism. Due to the ideological pull exerted by Hitler’s National Socialism, Mussolini’s regime established the CAUR in the summer of 1933, which emphasized that insurmountable differences existed between Italian fascism and German Nazism. Later, in 1938, he finally gave in: in October 1938, the Grand Council of Fascism issued the ‘Carta della razza’, and the Law for the Protection of the Italian Race came into effect on November 17, 1938. Author and source: The quote is from Benito Mussolini (Italian journalist, politician, and dictator, 1883–1945) and can be found in his ‘Opera omnia’, Volume 26, page 310. The original reads in Italian: “La Germania si compoone di diverse razze, più o meno felicemente miscelate fra loro come ognuno può constatare girando in Germania. Vedremo se il nazismo riuscirà a trarne un «armento» di sangue puro.” The quote is therefore a historically interesting moment: a fascist dictator criticizing the racism of his Nazi ally — and later largely going along with it himself.
