Anti-urbanism across Borders: Mussolini's Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Remodelling of “Space“ within Fascist Alliance

Settlement policy was one of the main fields of Axis cooperation between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The two dictatorships not only shared the basic assumption that “regenerating” the nation demanded a strict policy of “reruralizing” the country. It also came to a wide-ranging exchange of information between the countries’ leading settlement experts in terms of city planning and the remodelling of the rural “living space”. This led to mutual learning processes. The Italians, for instance, adapted the Reichserbhofgesetz which constituted the core of Nazi blood-and-soil ideology. Conversely, the Nazis were not only inspired by the Fascist New Towns in the Pontine Marshes and Mussolini’s social housing policy when transforming the German cities to fit the needs of the “National Community” after 1933. There is also indication that even in their settlement plans for Eastern Europe the Nazis looked to the colonial undertakings of Fascist Italy in Libya and Abyssinia for inspiration. Convergences like these demonstrate that the Nazi regime was not as unique as historiography has claimed so far. Rather, the history of the Third Reich has to be seen and analyzed to a far greater extent in terms of Italian Fascism. Only in this way will its true significance for the European history in the first half of the 20^th century be properly established.