If the name of the founder of the political party most associated with Germany doesn’t sound very German, that’s because he wasn’t. Benito Mussolini was a member of the Italian Socialist Party prior to WW I, but broke with them in his advocacy of Italian intervention. Following the end of the war, his views now crystallized, Mussolini became an ardent critic of socialism and left the party to found his own political movement to revive Italy.

On this day, March 23, in 1919, Benito Mussolini reformed his nascent pro-interventionist movement into Fasci di Combattimento (Italian Combat Squad), invoking the term for Italy’s peasant revolutionaries of the 1800s.

The Fascist party became the foundation for Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) party. Hitler was deeply influenced by Mussolini’s ideas of a one-party state, and total top-down control to prevent the kind of moral degradation supposedly seen in the democratic states. But Hitler and the Nazis were more radical, combining a racist Arian policy and antisemitism with the fascist ideals. Mussolini believed an elite group of politicians can raise a country into perfect form; Hitler believed those politicians could only be white and descended from Roman blood.