Fascism was an ultranationalist, authoritarian political movement that took power in Italy under Benito Mussolini in 1922 and in Germany under Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party in 1933, and influenced regimes elsewhere in Europe. It fused one-party dictatorship, suppression of opposition, militarism, corporatist economics and a cult of the leader and the nation-state, in Germany combined with violent racial ideology. Fascist regimes mobilised mass movements, rallies and propaganda to bind the population to the state. Their expansionism culminated in the Second World War and, in the Nazi case, the Holocaust.
Fascism drove Europe into war and genocide and marked the twentieth century's authoritarian extreme; its regimes deployed monumental axes, new towns and grand state architecture, as at the EUR district in Rome and Albert Speer's plans for Berlin, as instruments of mass mobilisation.