State four similarities between the ideologies of Nazism and Fascism.

(1) Both rejected DEMOCRACY and believed in a ONE-PARTY STATE under a single all-powerful leader whose word was law — Hitler as Der Führer, Mussolini as Il Duce. (2) Both held that the STATE IS SUPREME and the individual exists for it, and both suppressed all opposition parties, trade unions, free speech and a free press, using secret police and propaganda to control the people. (3) Both preached EXTREME NATIONALISM and glorified WAR and military strength as the path to national greatness, building up armies in defiance of the peace treaties. (4) Both were bitterly OPPOSED TO COMMUNISM and socialism, which won them the backing of industrialists and the middle classes; and both pursued aggressive IMPERIALIST EXPANSION — Italy in Ethiopia, Germany in Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Four marks, four similarities, one mark each. The word SIMILARITIES governs the whole answer: do NOT offer racism or anti-Semitism, which were distinctively NAZI and formed no part of Italian Fascism. That is the standing trap in this question, and it appears in several years of this paper. The four safe grounds are one-party dictatorship, the supremacy of the state, glorification of war, and hostility to communism.