The year 1938 was a momentous one for Chile. An elected political system that had run the country since a civil war in 1891 broke down in 1924–5 into a dictatorship with a highly limited legislature. A military opportunist, the then Colonel Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, consolidated power in the name of carrying through social and economic reforms while suppressing anarchists and communists. The president displaced by the coup that led to Ibáñez was Arturo Alessandri, a leader of the Radical Party and a populist rabble-rouser when he ran for office in 1920. The Ibáñez government collapsed during the Great Depression, to be replaced by a rapid succession of administrations including a short-lived socialist republic. The political class regrouped and re-established contested elections, and the outcome was the return of Alessandri in 1932. He served for six years, making and remaking congressional coalitions to maintain majority support, and then, since he could not succeed himself, he and the right-wing coalition that had held him in effective power since about 1934 chose his Minister of Hacienda (the Treasury) as his successor. They could not have picked a more unlikeable, arrogant person: Gustavo Ross Santa María, a specialist in banking and finance, descended from two of the most prominent families in the country. As head of Hacienda, he had instituted austerity policies so severe that his sobriquet among ordinary people was Minister of Hunger. Those in power considered his election a certainty, especially since he was facing a candidate for the Popular Front, which espoused a form of government that had led to civil war in Spain.

Marcus Klein provides some of this background in his study of the bloodiest episode of that election, the murder of some 70 young men on 5 September 1938. Writing in the format of a reduced-size book, he provides a concise, well-written account of how this massacre occurred and how its aftermath altered the electoral outcome. The dead belonged to the Movimiento Nacional Socialista (National Socialist Movement, MNS) or Nacis, led by Jorge González von Marées, and they died trying to overthrow the government. Their deaths led to the election of a Popular Front government, headed by another Radical and once friend of Alessandri, Pedro Aguirre Cerda. In short, they helped bring about an outcome they would have detested. Aguirre Cerda's administration was the first to include Marxists in its cabinet, members of the still young Socialist Party, and to be supported by the communists. Others, including myself, have told this story. Klein lays it out beautifully (although it helps if you read the opening paragraph of this review) and he does so in a sprinting 133 pages, providing new detail on almost every other page. The work then adds 11 tables and documents related to the Naci attack and the election.

Little is written today about the influence of fascism and the German Nazis in Latin America, but that influence was enormous, especially on relatively young men and rising politicians. Mussolini's success certainly shaped Ibáñez's administration of the late 1920s; the seizure of power by Hitler inspired the Nacis. As his name indicates, González von Marées was descended, in part, from German ancestry, and the Germans of Chile were a group that was proud of Hitler's Germany. González gathered other young men around him, largely members of the middle or lower middle classes obsessed with the social impact of the Depression and the chance to use Hitler's model of a new government. They began in 1932, started holding public meetings in Santiago in 1933, and ran for office and got 14,000 votes in a congressional election in 1937. They had their own publication and, of course, a paramilitary force with which to engage in street fights with young leftists. Their influence, however, went beyond votes and conflicts; they were part of a right-wing youth culture that, as Klein makes clear, was tolerated by the establishment. In 1938, looking for an opening in the national election, they recruited and supported none other than Carlos Ibáñez, turning the contest into a three-way race. When it became obvious that Ibáñez had no chance of winning, González von Marées and his closest supporters launched a plan to seize the major building of the national university and the workers' insurance centre, create a chaotic situation, and wait for the army to come and institute a coup against Alessandri. This fantasy was built from the respect that the army still had for Ibáñez.

The young men were armed, and they fired at authorities, but their plot unravelled almost as soon as it began. The entire affair took place within a few blocks of central Santiago. Alessandri, in the presidential palace, heard the first shots by the Nacis. The Carabineros, the national police, made a counter-attack, captured the Nacis at the University – many of them students in suits – and took them to the insurance building, using them as shields. When those in the Seguro Obrero building also surrendered, the police took them out and shot them all. Klein makes it clear that there is no other explanation for this massacre than that Alessandri ordered it. González von Marées coordinated the attack from afar and so physically survived the debacle; he was subsequently imprisoned and his career was over. Ibáñez, compromised in the mess, withdrew from the election in anger and shifted his support to the Popular Front. Alessandri was hounded by the disaster for the rest of his life.

Klein gets his facts straight and draws well-considered descriptions of the men involved. He is also right to remind us that young or not, middle-class or not, the Nacis were enthralled with totalitarian ideas. They thought nothing of the violence they would cause. If there is any fault in this study, it is that Klein gives us no class analysis, something especially needed to explain the complex political allegiances within the middle class, which produced the Nacis and the socialists at almost the same moment. As he does note, the supporters of Ross were so stunned at the outcome that they remained in denial for months after Aguirre Cerda took office. Given its format, this book will largely be placed on the shelves of Chilean historians, although it should appeal to anyone studying the Great Depression in Latin America or working on issues of comparative fascism.