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Benjamin G. Martin, Alessio Ponzio. Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1700–1701, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1700
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Alessio Ponzio’s Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany is a welcome contribution to the growing comparative and transnational historiography on the Nazi and fascist dictatorships. Building on the rich literature on youth mobilization in Nazi Germany and in fascist Italy, including Ponzio’s own 2009 study of the Fascist Academy for Physical Education in Rome, this book offers a comparative view of the two regimes’ main organizations for boys: Italy’s Opera nazionale balilla (reconfigured in 1937 as Gioventù italiana del littorio) and Germany’s Hitlerjugend. The book focuses in particular on the two organizations’ strategies for training and retaining youth leaders. Its most original sections, based on archival research in both countries, document the contacts and cooperation between the two organizations.
Moving chronologically, the book devotes one chapter to the origins and development of fascist Italy’s youth training program, from its origins as an autonomous pro-fascist students’ club to its incorporation in 1926 as a state institution, the Opera nazionale balilla (ONB). The following chapter examines how the ONB’s leader, Renato Ricci, sought to form a new class of youth leaders, focusing on the Accademia fascista di educazione fisica. A fine reconstruction of the Academy’s 1931 visit to the United States, hosted by the physical education guru Bernarr Macfadden, highlights the international resonance of the Italians’ youth program. Two chapters examine the Hitlerjugend (HJ), charting the organization’s origins and exploring its recruitment and training of leaders. Working largely with secondary sources, these chapters detail the HJ’s complex structures, highlighting the difference between fascist Italy’s centralized system and Germany’s comparative organizational chaos. Later chapters document the institutional transitions of the ONB—renamed and brought under the direct control of the Fascist Party in 1937—and of the HJ, which opened a central HJ leadership academy at Braunschweig in 1938, as well as the two institutions’ struggles to maintain their activities when their carefully trained cadres went off to war.
