This 1924 newsreel segment reports on a rousing speech by the Italian Prime Minister, and future dictator, Benito Mussolini to a mass rally of Fascist “Black Shirts” in Rome. It illustrates the German media's interest in the political and social developments of Fascist Italy in the 1920s, piqued by the obvious similarities between Mussolini’s Black Shirts and the various German far-right paramilitary organizations, including the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung (or SA, literally the “storm troopers” of the movement). Indeed, Hitler had just attempted a putsch in Munich the previous year that he had explicitly modeled on Mussolini’s own 1922 seizure of power, the “March on Rome.” Mussolini had already begun systematically building a fascist dictatorship by 1924, offering a further template for Hitler and other far-right schemers in Germany. In another scene in this segment, young men in Roman gymnastics clubs perform before Mussolini, echoing the cult of physical performance that already existed in the Weimar Republic and expanded further under the Nazi regime, with its intensified emphasis on military fitness.