The legacies that Mussolini, Hitler, and their followers assumed in 1922 and 1933 were difficult indeed. The interrelationships at the outset between two states' external and internal situations, their economic, military, and political instruments, and the dictators' goals demand painstaking analysis. For on them depended in large part the speed and extent of the regimes' subsequent radicalization and external success.

Economic and geopolitical constraints gripped both states, but with unequal force. Reparations, war debts, and the imperative need for foreign credit forced good behavior on both Rome and Berlin throughout the 1920s. But Hitler's arrival after the Great Depression touched bottom gave him a Germany freed in advance of the external financial tutelage that had helped preserve the Republic. Reparations ended in the first weeks of the Papen government; foreign lending had virtually ceased. The economy Hitler inherited was roughly equal in size to that of Britain and 39 percent of that of the United States; by 1938 the respective figures were 115 and 43 percent. Germany's technological prowess gave its post-1933 armed forces synthetic fuel and rubber, the hardest armor plate of the coming war, and the first nerve gases, operational jet fighters, and ballistic missiles. Much of Versailles already lay in ruins; Hitler could express ironic approbation of the Stresemann diplomacy he had once vilified: “Of [all] my predecessors, he was not the worst.