On the Origin and Evolution of European Fascism Introduction by Myra Moss
The development of European fascist ideology was in fluenced by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Romantic rebellion against Enlightenment philosophies. Intellectually, fascism represents a profound shift from an Enlightenment to a Romantic view of nature and humanity: this shift involves the rejection of a realist theory of an independently existing universe, as composed of distinct and separable material atoms, along with the denial of an a-historical essence of humankind, which remains the same regardless of historical circumstance and di ff ers ers fundamentally from nature and from the state; and the acceptance of an idealist conception of a spiritual yet historical, evolving, organically organically unified reality, reality, which includes the self as a necessary part of it. The Romantic conception of the organic unity among all existents, in contrast to the Enlightenment atomistic way of thinking, became essential, for example, to the fascist conception of the state. The concept of reality as a synthesized organism, rather than a collection of discrete entities, presupposes that any existent taken as a whole is greater than the numerical summation of its parts. “Gr “Greater” eater” means not merely larger in some quantitative sense, but also qualitatively better or more valuable. In the fascist state, moral dilemmas between values of institutions—whether political, economic, or sociological—and individuals became settled in favor of institutional values and justified in terms of the greater value expressed by the organic unity of the institution, of the whole of which the individual forms merely a part. The origin of the term “fascism “fascism”” lies in the Latin word “fascis “fascis”” that referred to
the bundle of rods surrounding a protruding axe and symbolizing a union of force, which lictors carried before a magistrate. During the nineteenth century, “fascio,” meaning a union of forces, more or less homogenous, but held together strongly by ideal and disciplinary chains, along with common goals to be reached, denoted extra- and anti-parliamentary groups. See Delzell, below. below. During the twentieth century, the concept of organic unity, which has been presupposed by both fascists and non-fascists, has been severely criticized by the positivist tradition and deconstructionist theories. The presence of an organic unity requires that the relations between parts par ts of a whole be necessary, necessary, not accidental or fortuitous, such su ch that if any part is changed, then the whole organism must also be altered.
What implications did the new Romantic concept of organic unity have for the idea of self? Romanticism affirmed the syntheses of all dialectical opposites that occur within human consciousness. The classical Enlightenment dualisms between expressions of pure reason and rational will became viewed accordingly as indistinguishably merged with one another.. The Romantic ideal was of man unified in thought and action another or will, as contrasted with the Enlightenment abstract vision of the pure intellectual or disinterested scientist. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Nietzsche’s conceptions of human nature as exhibiting a will-to-power and of the superman, who expresses it to the highest degree, especially in fluenced Hitler’ Hitler’ss idea of the Übermensch , as well as Mussolini’s idea of the uomo fascista . Mussolini also denied that fascism embodied any absolute dogmas or enduring principles, save those of expediency and power. In short, the superior man, by exercising his will to power, power, creates values for the rest of society. Sociologically, “fascism” meant a blurring of what had been rigid class distinctions distin ctions and thus a lessening of o f monarchical power. power. Culturally, fascism celebrated the artist, the athlete, the worker, and the soldier. Ideas and the external world, considered by the Enlightenment as also dialectically opposed to each other, were synthesized in Romantic philosophy to become the phenomena or appearances that form objects of consciousness. All real objects, whether facts or values, are essentially mental and spiritual creations of human consciousness. But if the real world is constructed by the human self, does the self remain windowless, imprisoned entirely in a universe of its own making? Not at all. When the self reflects upon the nature of its consciousness, it realizes that its essence is organically related to other selves, as well as to the history and culture of its nation, by means of vehicles of communication: verbal and non-verbal language. Whereas the Enlightenment presupposed an atomistic conception of self that remains autonomous in its relations to other selves and to its state, the Romantics recognized the essential unity of a self that includes its links to other humans— both past and present. The self aims to become aware of its essential unity by means of selfknowledge; and the goal of the state is to express a uni fied consciousness through its citizens. Consistent with the Romantic conception of self and nation, fascism called for the construction of a state—with unified political and economic institutions, and definite geographical borders—upon the nation, composed of persons bound together by language, history, and culture. This extra-territorial conception of nation came to justify foreign adventurism—the imposition of a foreign policy of annexation.
We have seen that according to the Romantic conception of reality, all values are creations of self. Consistent with this conception, fascist philosophy held that rebellion against the state in the name of abstract, permanent ideals that supposedly exist independently of human beings, or in the name of innate natural rights, was not justifiable. Nevertheless, for fascism, reform or even “revolution,” understood in terms of the evolutionary progress of human nature and values occurred continually within the state. Conflict was included within the structure of all political institutions and was destined to be resolved within more harmonious political entities. Tragically, fascist con flict often produced disharmony instead of superior harmony, and at times, even ended in chaos that lacked any positive accomplishment. What implications did the Romantic concept of organic unity have for fascist pedagogy? The terms of the classical dualism between education as theoria and moral instruction as praxis became considered as indistinguishably merged with one another. Educational theorists then inferred that the teacher is not a mere transmitter of “facts,” or a passive instrument of communication. He or she is the originator of culture and values. Enlightenment philosophy, moreover, had separated the contents of consciousness into objective and subjective and thus had presupposed the objective existence of a reality that existed independently of rational will; a reality that was to be observed and verified by an unemotional observer. In education, this metaphysical bifurcation between thought and reality had led to a division between objective sciences and subjective humanities. However, just as consciousness creates the unity of object with subject, the fascist f ascist educators reasoned, so should the educational curriculum express a uni fied scientific humanism. Inasmuch as the self depends for its existence upon its relations to other selves and upon its nation, fascist pedagogy argued further that all learning should be considered as national. The school is the primary instrument whereby a uni fied consciousness becomes realized. By , Giovanni Gentile, the self-proclaimed spokesman for fascist philosophy,, was considered by some Europeans and Britons to be the most influential phy teacher in the Western Western intellectual world. From to Gentile served as Mussolini’s first Minister of National Education (Mussolini had changed the
title from Public Instruction) and implemented what became known as “la riforma Gentile.” In Germany, Martin Heidegger’s acceptance of the Rectorship at Freiburg University provided cultural respectability for the Nazi dictatorship. In , his Rectorial Address, “The self-A ffirmation of the German University,” fused classical philosophy with Nazi rhetoric.
Intellectual needs of citizens were to be filled by academic courses that emphasized a positive patriotic history histor y of action and culture and stressed national contributions to humanity. Like public educational institutions in all the European fascist countries, art, architecture, and literature became vehicles of propaganda which served to unify citizens with one another and with their nation-state. We have described some of the common roots and ideas of European fascisms as residing in the Romantic rebellion against Enlightenment philosophy. Indeed, the similarities among the fascisms were far more profound than the di ff erences erences between them. The essays that follow treat specifically the Italian, German, and Austrian variants of European fascism. They were taken from a series of five lectures on the ideological roots of European fascism, which were delivered during the fall of , and sponsored by The Family of Benjamin Z. Gould Center for Humanistic Studies and Claremont McKenna College. Since these essays will detail the special characteristics of various fascisms, we will mention only two of the most salient to serve as an introduction to them. In “Fascism in Italy: Origins and Ideology,” Charles F. Delzell discusses the Italian corporate state as distinguished from the national socialism that characterized the fascist regimes occurring elsewhere in central and southeastern Europe. Ideologically its roots lay in Catholic social doctrine and in the Sorelian syndicalist tradition. The purpose of the corporate state was to end industrial strife by resolving con flicts within the higher purpose and needs of the nation-state. It was to be governed by representatives, furnished by corporations and by citizens organized as producers, which were determined territorially in elected comizi . Political factors were to dominate economic ones. The corporate order was conceived as a strict coordination of national forces, a means of greater production, of greater internal harmony and power power.. It was to serve the state in securing its goals. In “The Origins and Development of the Fascist Right in Germany and a Critique of the Methods used to Contain It,” Anthony Glees argues that the most important characteristics of past and present German fascism are claims of German ethnic superiority and anti-Semitism, anti- Semitism, rather than, for example, its anti-communist rhetoric. Indeed, in most Italians were dismayed when Mussolini imitated Hitler by introducing a racist and anti-Semitic policy. Certainly, in Italy, ethnic hatred Dr. Charles F. Delzell is Professor Emeritus and Adjunct Professor of History,
Vanderb anderbilt ilt University University,, Nashville, Nashvi lle, Tennesse Tennessee. e. Dr. Anthony Glees is Professor of History and Director of European Studies, The University of West West London, London, England.
and cleansing never achieved the degree of virulence that it has expressed in Germany. The situation was quite diff erent, erent, however, in Austria. As Bruce Pauley tells us in “Prelude to Disaster: The Evolution of Austrian Fascism,” after the Anschluss , the Austrian Nazis were no longer restrained. “By mid-June . . . Jews Jews had had alread alreadyy been been more more thoroug thoroughly hly purged from public life in Austria than in the five years following Hitler’s takeover of power in Germany.” One reason for the Austrian outburst of anti-Semitism, far in excess of anything the Italians ever demonstrated, probably was Austria’s location as a borderland: “Most of its provinces were located next to states with non-German nationalities, which heightened the Austrians’ sense of their own ethnicity.” Other causes lay in the Austrians’ Austrians’ belief that they could not exist as an independent nation and in their wish to unite with Germany. Germany. Yet Yet despite the fact that since World War II, Austria has become one of the most prosperous countries in the world, postwar polls have “revealed that anti-Semitism is substantially stronger in Austria than t han in Germany, Germany, France, or the United States.” Nevertheless, as Pauley reassures us, we have reason to hope that t hat education will contribute to the disappearance of these irrational ethnic prejudices.
Dr. Bruce F. Pauley is Professor of History, the University of Central Florida,
Orlando, Florida.
Fascism in Italy: Origins and Ideology by Charles F. Delzell
On March , a new term, “fascism,” entered our political vocabulary. On that Sunday afternoon, in the revolutionary atmosphere of postwar Milan, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist movement of young war veterans, the Fasci di Combattimento, or “fighting Fascists,” emerged on the scene. A revolutionary radicalism of the Right, it espoused an action-oriented, hybrid mixture of ultranationalism, national syndicalism, anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism, anti-democracy, and anti-paci fism, among other things. Later, that same year, a similar movement, but a far more racist and violent one, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism, emerged in Germany. In October , the more moderate Italian version of Fascism managed to seize political power first. And for a decade or so, Italian Fascism was to serve as the principal model for kindred movements elsewhere in the world. Many of the philosophical roots of Italian Fascism had been growing in western and central Europe since about the turn of the century, when two important developments were taking place: an intellectual revolution in social thought, and the entry of the masses into politics. Here I can allude only to several of the new currents of thought. One certainly included the concept of organic nationalism, which was associated with the writings of Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, Enrico Corradini, and In English, Italian Fascism is usually spelled with a capital “F.” Analogous move-
ments elsewhere are often spelled in lower case “f.” The terms “fascism” comes from the Italian word, “fasci” (plural), which means “bundles,” and was adopted from ancient Rome to denote a group or alliance, especially if aspiring to political power. In –, the Sicilian fasci became virtual peasant leagues. In –, Benito Mussolini organized the Fasci di azione rivoluzionaria as a network of pressure groups to campaign for Italy’s entry into the Great War. The problem of defining Italian Fascism, which was in constant flux, can probably best be done by writing its history, as Angelo Tasca suggested in his pioneering study, The Rise of Italian Fascism, – , translated by Peter and Dorothy Wait (London: Methuen, ; reprinted in by Howard Fertig, Inc., New York). How to de fine generic fascism is much more controversial. At least a dozen interpretations have been suggested. The oldest was that of the Comintern, which simplistically perceived fascism to be the “agent” of capitalism in its final, “imperialist” stage. Variants of this theory have perceived fascism as a new kind of “Bonapartism,” and as a function of a particular stage of economic growth. Other writers have interpreted fascism as a revolt by the lower middle-class, which fears status deprivation. Still others have seen fascism as the inevitable development of certain countries like Italy and Germany;
Luigi Federzoni. Another current was formed by Georges Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism, which rejected parliamentary government and, with much use of violence and revolutionary myths, advocated instead government by labor syndicates. Sorel’s philosophy attracted and in fluenced numerous Italians, including Arturo Labriola, Filippo Corradoni, Sergio Panunzio, and not least, Benito Mussolini. These prewar currents also involved Social Darwinism in its many manifestations, along with its theory of the struggle between nations. The “will to power” and the notion of a heroic leader, as expounded by Friedrich Nietzsche and his Italian admirer, Gabriele D’Annunzio, were important. So was Henri Bergson’s perception of the role of intuition and of élan vital . Filippo Marinetti’s noisy Futurist movement in politics and the arts provided one of the radical themes of Italian Fascism. The political sociologist Vilfredo Pareto’s critique of liberalism and of parliamentary government and his positive evaluation of the role of elites and force in society greatly influenced Mussolini. To a lesser degree, he was impressed by the writings of Roberto Michels and Gaetano Mosca. Gustave LeBon’s study of the manipulation of crowds also appealed to the Fascists. The experiences of World War I, however, were required for the crystallization of these intellectual currents into “Fascism.” The war demonstrated the State’s ability to mobilize the masses and the national economy, and revealed that people often readily accepted quasi-dictatorship. It brought about the transformation of revolutionary syndicalism into “national syndicalism,” and encouraged a perception of the importance of those or as a consequence of the rise of “amorphous masses”; or as “totalitarianism”; or as a “moral sickness” or as the result of psychological disabilities. The most recent interpretation is that of Roger Gri ffin, a British political scientist, who plays down economic factors and de fines generic fascism as “palingenetic ultranationalism” that seeks through populist mobilization to create a Utopian rebirth of the nation. It seems unlikely that we shall reach full agreement on any formula that satisfies all conceivable objections. See Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martins Press, ); Stanley G. Payne, Fascism: Comparison and De fi nition (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, ): Renzo De Felice, Interpretations of Fascism , trans. by Brenda Everett Huff (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ); Walter Laqueur, ed. Fascism, A Reader’s Guide: Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); A. James Gregor, Interpretations of Fascism (Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press, ); Alan Cassels, Fascism (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., ); Charles F. Delzell, ed., Mediterranean Fascism, – (New York: Macmillan, ); Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism (New York: D. Van Nostrand, ); and Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism , trans. by Leila Vennewitz (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, ).
groups, who were regarded as the true “producers” in the nation’s economy. The war sharply exacerbated divisions between those Italian patriots who supported the war and those who did not, especially Marxian Socialists and other paci fists. It also revealed how propaganda could manipulate the masses. Numerous domestic political and historical factors help to explain why Italy was to become especially susceptible to Fascist propaganda. In contrast to Britain and France, Italy had achieved its national uni fication only recently (–), and it did not have a long experience with parliamentary government. Regional diff erences remained strong. There was much disillusionment with the new national government, which, for the next half century, was dominated by a small elite of anticlerical Liberals, who had been elected by a narrow franchise. Italy’s government was not efficient. Most of the peninsula lacked a tradition of voluntary civic cooperation. The economy remained predominantly agricultural, and the land tenure system was often medieval in nature. Vast illiteracy and poverty prevailed, especially in the South. A high rate of emigration had occurred by the turn of the century. Only in the north western “triangle,” Milan-Turin-Genoa, did an industrial revolution begin to occur by the s, thereby opening the way for Marxian Socialist and Sorelian syndicalist movements to displace the anarchosocialists, who had dominated the revolutionary Left after the s. Italy’s industrial revolution, unlike Britain’s, was not spread over a long time span that would have facilitated an easier accommodation to the new social tensions. Political and social disorders were greatly heightened in , when Italy suff ered a humiliating defeat at Adowa during its e ff ort to expand its fledgling colonial empire from Eritrea into Ethiopia. This triggered four years of violent turmoil. Fortunately, the situation began to improve during the era ( –) of a more enlightened Liberal premier, Giovanni Giolitti. In the wake of the Libyan War (–), he recognized the political necessity of moving toward a democratic suff rage. But in , only one parliamentary election under the new system took Regarding prewar and wartime tendencies toward Fascism, see Zeev Sternhall,
“Fascism,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought , ed. David Miller (Oxford and New York: Blackwell Reference, ), pp. –; Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste (Paris: Fayard, ); Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), chs. – ; Adrian Lyttelton, ed., Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile (New York: Harper, ); and David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Chapel Hill, N. C.: University of North Carolina Press, ).
place before , when Italy’s belated and controversial entry into the Great War weakened the entire parliamentary system. Widespread opposition to the war, especially among Socialists and Catholics, as well as Italy’s narrow escape from military disaster at Caporetto in October left, the country dazed and badly divided. Most Italians were Roman Catholic, but ever since , when the “usurping” new Kingdom of Italy seized Rome from the Papacy, bitter hostility prevailed between Church and State. The Vatican refused to recognize the legality of the Kingdom and instructed the faithful to boycott national elections. The ban lasted, for the most part, until , when the Church, having become afraid that atheistic Marxism might otherwise dominate the country, allowed a Catholic Popular Party to organize and participate in the election scheduled for November . By the end of the war, the Liberals faced a major challenge to their political hegemony. This watershed in Italy’s political system was caused when pressure from Socialists, Catholics, and others forced the Liberals to agree to a new system of proportional representation in parliament. Going into eff ect for the elections in , the new system of proportional representation produced a badly splintered parliament. The Socialists and the Popolari emerged as the two largest “parties of the masses.” Ideologically incompatible, they were not willing to form a post war coalition government. Instead, the Socialists, large segments of whom were under the spell of the recent Bolshevik victory in Russia, embarked upon a revolutionary political off ensive in Italy’s Po Valley. During the “Red biennium” of –, the Socialists won control in hundreds of northern cities. Much of Italy seemed on the brink of civil war. Meanwhile, political turmoil was exacerbated by Italy’s failure at the Peace Conference to obtain Fiume and some of the Dalmatian Coast. Many patriots began to feel that Italy’s war eff ort had achieved only a “mutilated victory.” These frustrated ultranationalists began to look for a more aggressive national leader. Benito Mussolini, the man who launched the Fascist movement in , was born in the Romagna region of the lower Po valley in . His father was an anarcho-socialist blacksmith. Young Mussolini, having acquired a high school education, started out as a schoolteacher and then became a journalist. He read voraciously but super ficially, and moved about in northern Italy, Switzerland, and Austria. A chameleon in politics, early in the century he identi fied himself with Marxian Socialism, often adulterated by revolutionary syndicalism. When in –, Giolitti fought a war to conquer Libya, Mussolini strongly denounced this “imperialist” conflict. He was promptly arrested. Afterwards, the
Italian Socialist Party rewarded him with the editorship of its official newspaper in Milan, Avanti! In the autumn of , however, Mussolini suddenly broke with the Socialist Party’s neutralist line and called, instead, for Italy to intervene in the Great War on the side of France and Britain. Expelled from the Socialist Party, the revolutionary heretic soon established his own interventionist newspaper in Milan, Il Popolo d’Italia . Along with Gabriele D’Annunzio and others, in May , Mussolini played a significant role in pushing Italy into the Great War. During that conflict he served for a time in the army. But after being injured in the explosion of a trench mortar, he was released and sent back to his newspaper desk, where he continued to support the war. In March , the meeting in Milan that founded the Fascist movement attracted somewhat more than one hundred people. Most were young veterans, and many were members of crack Arditi units, which were formed in the wake of Italy’s military crisis at Caporetto. Also present were anticlerical Futurists such as the iconoclastic Filippo Marinetti, and neo-syndicalists like Michele Bianchi, who had converted to ultra-nationalism during the war. The new Fascist movement was vehement in its denunciation of Marxist Socialism and of Democratic Liberalism, and it did not hesitate to use violence against its foes. At the same time, it was partly radical in its program, calling for both anticlericalism and establishment of a republic. It was also partly “productivist,” with its insistence on support for the country’s genuine economic producers. The Fascist movement, extoling the “rights of Italy” and the “values of war,” was defensive about it. This hybrid program failed, however, to attract many voters. In the elections in November , Mussolini obtained a scant , votes in Milan, the city which was his political base. Clearly, something in the Fascist program had to be changed if the new movement was going to “take off .” In August and September , the opportunity to achieve a political breakthrough occurred when Socialist metal workers had raised the Red flag over many factories that they had occupied during “sit-in” strikes. Finally, however, the strikers were forced to accede to the industrialists’ terms. The crisis greatly frightened property owners, along with others, who were angry with the policy of non-interference maintained by the Giolitti government. The Fascists promised that they would A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics: Blum, Rathenau, Marinetti (New York: Harper & Row, ); and Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista ( – ) (Rome-Bari: Laterza, ).
restore industrial discipline. As a result of their sudden shift to the right, the Fascists now received increasing financial support from worried property owners. Simultaneously, a reactionary and brutal new form of Fascism, agrarian Fascism, was emerging in the lower Po Valley, where landowners were alarmed by the eff orts of Socialist and Catholic labor leaders to organize the farm workers. Local Fascist war veterans like Dino Grandi, Italo Balbo, and Roberto Farinacci now began to organize their own tame Fascist labor syndicates to challenge the “red” and “white” syndicates of the opposition. They also organized squads of armed Fascist Blackshirts. These squadristi carried out punitive raids at night, often in collusion with the police, and with weapons easily obtained from local army depots. They set fire to headquarters of the farm workers’ unions, and they beat up and poured castor oil down the throats of those whom they caught. This aggressive agrarian form of Fascism of the lower Po valley threatened to overpower Mussolini’s own predominantly urban Fascism. He managed, however, to retain control by agreeing to amalgamate the two currents. No longer could Mussolini, by now the “Duce” of Fascism, toy with the possibility of a truce with either the Socialists or Liberals. At the end of , Fascism attracted additional recruits from Gabriele D’Annunzio’s rival organization in Fiume. This demagogic poetcondottiere had seized power in the disputed Adriatic seaport of Fiume from until December , when he was finally forced to leave by order of Premier Giolitti. In Fiume, D’Annunzio had devised many of the dramatic public rituals that Mussolini’s Fascism now appropriated: the “Roman” outstretched arm salute; eerie battle-cries; and the liturgical interaction between the Duce speaking from the balcony and his followers in the piazza. D’Annunzio had also experimented with a “corporative State,” a political-economic structure that was based on cooperation among functional categories of “producers.” Adopted by Mussolini, this kind of capitalist organization was to be further developed by the Fascist dictatorship in the mid- s. By , Italy’s “Red biennium” had petered out. The Fascists were gaining the clear advantage in Italy’s quasi-civil war. In November, in a In addition to Tasca’s book on the rise of Italian Fascism to power, see Roberto
Vivarelli, Storia delle origini del fascismo: L’Italia dalla grande guerra alla marcia su Roma ( vols.; Bologna: Il Mulino, ); and Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, – (New York: Charles Scribner’s, ). Michael A. Ledeen, The First Duce: D’Annunzio at Fiume (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ).
congress held in Rome, Mussolini’s “movement” reconstituted itself as a full-fledged “party,” the National Fascist Party (PNF). Statistics gathered at that time revealed that the Fascist Party membership was composed predominantly, though not exclusively, of war veterans, young people, property-owners, and persons from the lower middle-class. The PNF elected to the lower house of parliament Fascists, including Mussolini. But in a chamber composed of deputies, this was not nearly enough to enable the Fascists to form a government. And Mussolini was now in a hurry to seize power. In September , he decided to go to Udine, one of the battlefields in the recent war. There he proclaimed a sharp reversal of some aspects of his program. He repudiated talk of a republic and promised that Fascism would preserve the monarchy (the House of Savoy). This new policy would neutralize any resistance from the Armed Forces, which had taken oaths of loyalty to the King. Mussolini, moreover, extended an olive branch to the Vatican, intimating that Fascism was ready to negotiate a settlement of the long, bitter conflict between Church and State. In October , the Fascist Party moved farther down the peninsula to hold its next congress in Naples. There it voted to have its Blackshirt militias, under the command of four newly appointed quadrumvirs , converge on Rome and seize political power. Mussolini hastened back to Milan to await the outcome of the Fascist March on Rome. If it failed, he could escape to Switzerland. Before the advancing Fascist militias reached the outskirts of Rome, the timid monarch, Victor Emmanuel III, decided to reject the advice of Premier Luigi Facta, who wanted the King to proclaim a state of siege and martial law. Instead, the King ordered that a telegram be dispatched to Mussolini, which asked him to form a new government. Mussolini decided to accept the King’s invitation. As the Fascist leader boarded the overnight train to Rome, the wife of the British ambassador overheard him tell the station master, “I want to leave exactly on time. From now on everything has got to function perfectly.” Thus originated the myth that Mussolini caused Italy’s trains to run on time. Next morning, the Duce was received by the King. Mussolini was still wearing his blackshirt, rather than the formal attire customary for such important occasions. He apologized for his dress and explained, “I have come straight from the battle, which, fortunately, was won without bloodshed.” Ivone Kirkpatrick, Mussolini: A Study in Power (New York: Hawthorn Books, ), p. . Max Gallo, Mussolini’s Italy: Twenty Years of the Fascist Era , trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Macmillan, ), p. .
On October , Mussolini came to power, legally, At the age of , he was the youngest premier in Italy’s history. He headed a coalition government composed of Fascists, Popolari , Social Democrats, Liberals, and Nationalists. Leaders of his coalition parties naively thought that they could tame and co-opt the Fascists into Italy’s time-honored system of political trasformismo . An upturn in the economy helped Premier Mussolini’s new government. In a move designed to please Army leaders and conservatives, Mussolini converted the Fascist squadristi units into a more disciplined MVSN (Volunteer Militia for National Security). He bombarded the Greek island of Corfu, and he successfully put pressure on Yugoslavia to relinquish Fiume to Italy. In , the older Nationalist party (the ANI: Associazione Nazionale Italiana, which dated from ), united with the Fascist Party, bringing into it a number of prominent and influential intellectuals, such as Professor Alfredo Rocco and Luigi Federzoni. But this enlargement of the Fascist Party was still not enough to alter Italy’s constitutional system. For that, Mussolini would need a two-thirds majority in parliament. To achieve that goal, he proceeded to persuade parliament to enact a new electoral law, which would give two-thirds of the seats to whichever party list won a plurality. In the ensuing parliamentary elections of April , the PNF claimed to have won . percent of the votes. But on May, Giacomo Matteotti, the widely respected leader of the “revisionist” Unitary Socialist Party, citing many instances of irregularities and intimidations, challenged the validity of the outcome. Constant interruptions and threats from the Fascist benches made it di fficult for him to speak. A few days later, on June , Matteotti was kidnapped by Fascist thugs and brutally stabbed to death. The ensuing political uproar lasted six months. Many of the opposition deputies, composed of Socialists, Catholic Popolari , Republicans, and Constitutional Democrats, boycotted sessions of parliament and organized the Aventine Secession. They pinned their strategy on the King, by expecting him to dismiss the badly compromised premier, dissolve parliament, and call for new elections. But the King refused to act, even though there existed considerable evidence that Fascists in Mussolini’s own Press o ffice had given the signal to the gangsters to teach Matteotti “a lesson.” Meanwhile, hard-line squadristi in the Party, like Roberto Farinacci, urged the Duce to launch a violent counteroff ensive, Fascism’s “second wave.” On January , Mussolini decided to carry out a coup d’état . In a defiant speech before parliament, he took personal responsibility for
everything that had happened, including the rubber truncheons and castor oil, and promised that everything would be cleared up within hours. What ensued was establishment of the Fascist dictatorship “on the installment plan.” With no resistance from the King, the Fascist “regime” was consolidated through press censorship and brutal suppression of opposition groups. One by one, the non-Fascist political parties, labor syndicates, and the Masonic Lodge were banned. Several anarchist plots against Mussolini’s own life provided the Duce with pretexts for each tightening of the screw. The “exceptional decrees” of November completed the process. As a result, hundreds of Communist, Socialist, and other leftist leaders were hunted down and arrested by the secret police. The Fascist Special Tribunal was created to prosecute political foes. During the ensuing years, this Special Tribunal sentenced more than , individuals to , years of imprisonment. There was no right of appeal. Many other political foes were convicted by regular courts and exiled to desolate islands and towns in the South. The luckier anti-Fascist leaders escaped abroad—clandestinely, because their passports had been cancelled. Most of them headed to France, where they tried to regroup and carry on the struggle as best they could. Henceforth, Fascist Italy was governed by a “totalitarian,” single-party regime. Party and State were interlocked in an overlapping structure. Mussolini wore two hats: he was both Il Duce of Fascism and Capo del Governo (Head of the Government). Before long, he moved his o ffice into Palazzo Venezia. From its balcony he frequently harangued the crowds that were dutifully rounded up by party leaders. The Fascist Grand Council, composed of appointed gerarchi (“hierarchs”), became the supreme organ of the Party. Loyalty oaths were required of professors. Walls were plastered with Fascist slogans that proclaimed, “Nothing above the State, nothing against the State!” “The Duce is always right!” All that now remained of Italy’s old political system was the weakened monarchy and the appointive Senate, which, however, was soon to be packed with Fascists. Mussolini’s ingenious compromise with the House of Savoy, which was described as the “dyarchy” system, survived until July . King Victor Emmanuel III was still “head of state” and commander-in-chief of the regular armed forces, but Mussolini kept control over the Fascist Militia. Though jealous and often humiliated, the King gave in to the Duce’s wishes on most occasions, including those of going to war. Charles F. Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies: The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ; reprint ed., New York: Howard Fertig, ), p. .
The Fascist totalitarian regime worked hard and with considerable success to indoctrinate the Italian populace. The regime mobilized most of the masses in its support by means of almost incessant propaganda, Fascist youth movements, a Fascist leisure-time organization, called “Dopolavoro,” for the workers, and expanded social services. As a result, the charismatic Duce enjoyed widespread popularity both at home and abroad. Many conservatives in Britain, France, and America perceived Mussolini’s Fascism to be an ingenious solution to the industrial problems of the twentieth century and a “bulwark against bolshevism.” Many foreigners were also impressed by the Duce’s elaborate politicoeconomic system, the Corporative State, which was designed to put an end to industrial strife. This system had its philosophical roots in Catholic social doctrine and in the Sorelian syndicalist tradition. Under Fascism, however, the Corporative State became a cumbersome bureaucratic hodgepodge of employers and employees’ “corporations.” These co-existed under the watchful eye of the Fascist dictatorship, which always retained the “last word,” and which stood ready to “crack the whip” over both, if necessary. In practice, the Fascist Corporative State satisfied employers more than it did the workers; because the employers were left largely free to organize themselves, whereas the workers were required to join tame labor syndicates that were sponsored by the Fascists. Strikes and lockouts were banned. Special labor courts settled industrial disputes. Eventually, the cumbersome apparatus of Mussolini’s Corporative State was completed by refashioning the lower house of the emasculated parliament into a new Chamber of Fasces and Corporations. The Corporative State did not safeguard Italy from the Great Depression. Massive unemployment and underemployment persisted until military mobilization in the mid-s siphoned off some of it. Other Fascist economic policies included protective tari ff s; economic self-sufficiency, referred to as the “Battle for Grain”; land reclamation; and public works, such as construction of highways, port facilities, stadiums, and government buildings. Fascism glorified “rural values,” but See Edward R. Tannenbaum, The Fascist Experience: Italian Society and Culture, – (New York: Basic Books, ); Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e mass media (Rome-Bari: Laterza, ); Victoria de
Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Doug Thompson, State Control in Fascist Italy: Culture and Conformity, – (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, ); and John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).
it did nothing to change the medieval land-tenure system in the vast latifondi estates owned by absentee landlords in Italy’s impoverished South. During the Great Depression, Fascism also sponsored an innovative system of “parastate capitalism” designed to finance key sectors of the economy. These gigantic state holding companies, operating under the new Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, or the IRI, became the economic fiefdoms of Italy’s ruling party; first the Fascists and then, after , the Christian Democrats. The IRI and the historic Church-State agreements were to be two innovations of Fascism that outlasted the dictatorship. The Lateran Pacts with the Holy See were signed by Mussolini on February . These historic agreements brought an end to half a century of hostility between Church and State. By the terms of the Lateran Treaty, Italy and the Vatican now recognized each other diplomatically. And by the Lateran Concordat, Roman Catholicism became the official religion of the state. Italy agreed to enforce Church law regarding the marriage sacrament. This meant that divorce was illegal. Any eff ort to annul a marriage had to be processed by Church courts. This greatly angered Italy’s Liberals and anticlericals, and even a minority of Fascist radicals like Filippo Marinetti. The Lateran pacts also called upon the Kingdom of Italy to make a generous financial settlement with the Holy See. The Lateran pacts won Mussolini much praise from devout Catholics, not only in Italy, but all over the world. With Italian Catholics now fully integrated into the nation, the Fascist regime enjoyed broad domestic support for several years, despite a flare-up between rival Fascist and Catholic youth organizations in . This brief squabble between an authoritarian Church and the would-be totalitarian regime ended with the Church backing down and restricting its youth groups to purely religious activities. Fascism’s “years of consensus,” as the historian Renzo De Felice has labeled them, lasted from until Italy’s triumph over Ethiopia in . On the Corporative State and Fascist economic policies, one may begin by
reading Roland Sarti, “Fascist modernization in Italy: Traditional or revolutionary?” American Historical Review . (); and Alexander De Grand, Giuseppe Bottai e la cultura fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, ). See Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Gli anni del consenso, – (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, ). For the Lateran pacts, see also Daniel A. Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, , ); and John F. Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism. – : A Study in Con fl ict (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, ).
Meanwhile, in , as the tenth anniversary of the Fascist “revolution” was approaching, many Fascists were keenly aware that there was still no authoritative statement de fining the Fascist ideology. When, in , Fascism made its debut, it had lacked the kind of doctrinal clarity that Lenin’s Communism possessed when it seized power in Russia. Italian Fascism seemed amorphous and opportunistic. Indeed, it consisted of several competing fascisms that were cobbled together. It was always much easier to identify what Fascism was against than what it was for. One of the major projects to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Fascist advent to power was publication in Rome of an impressive multivolume Enciclopedia Italiana . The editors, understandably, wanted to include an authoritative article on “Fascismo.” They turned initially to Giovanni Gentile, a neo-Hegelian philosopher who had joined the Fascist party in and had served for two years as Mussolini’s first Minister of Education. But Gentile’s rather ponderous essay did not please several leaders of the party’s more anti-intellectual wing. Gentile, they complained, had gotten his ideas not from the Fascist Revolution, but from foreigners of the last century such as Fichte and Hegel. This group insisted that only the Duce should compose and sign so important an article. Mussolini thereupon agreed to study Gentile’s draft. He spent the next three days composing his own supplement to it, which he subtitled “The Doctrine of Fascism.” Whereas Gentile’s introductory section was essentially a reprise of an earlier essay he had written in academic style, Mussolini’s supplement was more straightforward and popular in tone. What the Duce set forth in this famous essay has sometimes been termed the “working ideology” of Fascism. Mussolini began by admitting frankly that, back in , “I had no specific doctrinal attitude in my mind. . . . I had a living experience of one doctrine only—that of Socialism from / to the winter of . . . . My own doctrine, even in this period had always been a doctrine of action.” See, for example, Lyttelton, ed., Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile ; and Griffin, The Nature of Fascism , ch. . These and ensuing quotations come from Benito Mussolini, “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism,” International Conciliation, # (Jan. ), pp. –. An English version is also available in Benito Mussolini, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (Rome: “Ardita,” ), pp. –, reprinted in
New York by Howard Fertig, Inc. On the evolution of Mussolini’s myth of the new State, see also Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello stato nuovo dall’antigiolittismo al fascismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, ); and Pier Giorgio Zunino, L’ideologia del fascismo: Miti, credenze e valori nella stabilizzazione del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, .
In earlier essays written by Gentile and Alfredo Rocco on the roots of Fascism, those authors had pointed to the influence of Imperial Rome, Niccolo Machiavelli, Giuseppe Mazzini, and to theories of the organic state. To that pedigree, Mussolini now added several publicists who had been active at the start of the twentieth century. Thus, he explained, “in the great stream of Fascism are to be found ideas which began with [Georges] Sorel, [Charles] Péguy, with [Hubert] Lagardelle. . . and with the Italian trade union movement, which throughout the period – was sounding a new note of [syndicalism].” In addition to Sorel’s challenging ideas on the role of myths, force, and revolutionary syndicalism, Mussolini underscored the relevance to Fascism of Vilfredo Pareto’s elitist anti-liberalism, William James’s pragmatism, Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power,” and Auguste Blanqui’s glori fication of violence. Mussolini went on to claim that Fascism had now become a doctrine with its own individuality. “Above all,” it “believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of pacifism—born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.” “This anti-paci fist spirit is carried by Fascism even into the life of the individual: the proud motto of the Squadrista, ‘Me ne frego!’ [‘I don’t worry about death!’], written on the bandage of the wound, is an act of philosophy. . . and a new way of life for Italy. Thus the Fascist. . . conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest.” Fascism, the Duce continued, is “the complete opposite of Marxian Socialism.” “Fascism. . . believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions in fluenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. . . . Above all, Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society.” Not only does Fascism combat Socialism, but also “the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it.” “Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society;. . . and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal su ff rage.” The Duce explained that Fascism, “having first (for reasons of expediency) assumed an attitude [favorable to] republicanism, [thereafter] renounced this point of view before the March to Rome.” It did so because democracy is a regime “ruled by many kings—more absolute, tyrannical, and ruinous than one sole king.”
Fascism, the Duce continued, is in “complete opposition to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political field and the field of economics.” “But the Fascist negation of Socialism, Democracy, and Liberalism,” he hastened to add, “must not be taken to mean that Fascism desires to lead the world back to the state of aff airs before . . . . Fascism has not chosen De Maistre for its high-priest,” he explained. Whereas “the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy,. . . it may rather be expected that [the twentieth] will be a century of authority, a century of the Right, a century of Fascism. . . . This will be the century of collectivism, and hence the century of the State.” Mussolini then declared that “Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State.” “The Fascist State is itself conscious, and has itself a will and a personality—thus it may be called the ‘ethic’ State.” It “has drawn into itself even the economic activities of the nation, and through the corporative social and educational institutions created by it, its influence reaches every aspect of the national life. . . all the political, economic and spiritual forces of the nation.” The State “is the force which alone can provide a solution to the dramatic contradictions of capitalism.” The individual in the Fascist State “is not annulled but rather multiplied, just in the same way that a soldier in a regiment is not diminished but rather increased by the number of his comrades,” Mussolini asserted. “The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom but retains what is essential: the deciding power in this question can not be the individual but the State alone.” Turning to the question of the Church, Mussolini asserted that “the Fascist State is not indiff erent to the fact of religion in general, or to that particular and positive faith which is Italian Catholicism. The State professes no theology, but a morality, and in the Fascist State religion is considered as one of the deepest manifestations of the spirit of man; thus it is not only respected but defended and protected.” Finally, the Duce emphasized that “for Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence.” Italy must pursue a demographic policy of population growth. “Peoples which are rising. . . are always imperialist; any renunciation is a sign of decay and of death.” “If every age has its own characteristic doctrine, there are a thousand signs which point to Fascism as the characteristic doctrine of our time,” Mussolini concluded.
Coinciding with publication of this article was the launching of “universal fascism” by Italian Fascists who wanted to see the doctrine copied elsewhere. An eff ort was made in Lausanne to promote the internationalization of fascism under Italian auspices, but this did not get far, chiefly because Hitler’s racist National Socialism was emerging as a stronger and more brutal rival to Mussolini’s original brand of fascism. The Duce’s emphasis in his encyclopedia article on Fascist militarism and imperialism was not accidental, because at this very time he was preparing for an invasion of Ethiopia and establishment of an empire in east Africa. He was also dreaming of expanding Italy’s influence into the Danubian, Balkan, and Mediterranean regions. By May , he succeeded in conquering Ethiopia, in spite of the League of Nations’ weak economic sanctions imposed against Italy. The Duce now had reached the height of his popularity at home. But his triumph went to his head. He really began to believe all of the myths he had sedulously promoted. The cult of ducismo got underway. Mussolini now dreamed of creating a new warrior breed of “Fascist man,” the uomo fascista . Moreover, because of his anger toward Britain and France which had promoted the League’s sanctions program, Mussolini decided to seek no new accommodation with them. Instead, he would align Fascist Italy with Nazi Germany. The resulting Rome-Berlin Axis of October was solidi fied by the two dictators’ joint intervention in the Spanish Civil War on the side of General Franco’s Insurgents. The Axis agreement signaled the beginning of Mussolini’s decline. During the costly Spanish Civil War, which dragged on until March , the Duce sacrificed Italy’s air force, as well as its tanks and artillery. Within Italy, the increasingly unpopular Axis policy became obvious when Hitler annexed Austria in , thereby depriving Italy of the strong in fluence it had formerly enjoyed in that state. In the autumn of , most Italians were even more dismayed when Mussolini imitated Hitler by foolishly introducing a racist and antiSemitic policy. He tried to justify this partly on a perceived need to prevent racial miscegenation in Italy’s new African Empire. Mussolini found it hard to whip up animosity against the Jews. Only some , Jews lived in Italy. Most of these families had been living there for centuries and had become thoroughly assimilated during the period of Italy’s national unification. Numerous Italian Jews had also been supporters See Michael A. Ledeen, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, – (New York: Howard Fertig, ). Regarding Mussolini’s aggressive foreign policy, see Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini’s Roman Empire (New York: Viking, I ).
of Fascism in its early years. One of Mussolini’s former mistresses, Margherita Sarfatti, was Jewish. After , foreign Jews who had escaped from Nazi Germany were subject to internment. But most native Italian Jews, though henceforth severely restricted in their activities, did not face a threat to their very lives until September , when Hitler’s Germany seized control of northern Italy. Thereafter, all Jews in the northern half of the country were brutally rounded up, and more than , were hauled away to Nazi extermination camps. We must emphasize that the Duce launched his racial policy entirely on his own. By , Mussolini was visibly losing his grip. He su ff ered from a chronic ulcer and was beginning to look like an old man. He was also being repeatedly upstaged by Hitler. The Duce had made no plans for a political successor. His son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, aspired to succeed the Duce, but Ciano was disliked by rival hierarchs. King Victor Emmanuel, for his part, was increasingly unhappy with the “dyarchy.” Mussolini’s latest mistress, Clara Petacci, was unpopular. Rumors abounded that the Petacci clan was deeply involved in the financial corruption that was now pervasive in the regime. In April , only a few weeks after the end of his costly intervention in the Spanish Civil War, Mussolini ordered the invasion of Albania. And a month later, he agreed to a military alliance with Nazi Germany, named the “Pact of Steel.” But in September , when Hitler launched World War II with his invasion of Poland, Mussolini was in no position to help his ally. It was not until June , when Hitler had driven British forces off the Continent at Dunkirk, and France was on its knees, that the Italian jackal decided to declare war in order to gain some of the booty. Once again, the King acquiesced. Hitler treated the Duce’s intervention with contempt, and he permitted Italy to gather up only a few territorial crumbs from defeated France. Soon, British forces in east Africa began to throw the Italians out of their short-lived empire on that continent. At the same time, British naval units wrote “finis” to Mussolini’s dreams of converting the Mediterranean Sea into a new Roman mare nostrum. Mussolini’s ill-starred invasion of Greece in October quickly bogged down. Hitler came to the Duce’s rescue in the spring of . That same year, the Germans and Italians carved up Yugoslavia between them. In June , when Hitler invaded Soviet Russia, Mussolini tagged along. See Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy, – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ); and Susan
Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, Survival (New York: Basic Books, ).
On December , three days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Mussolini and Hitler foolishly declared war on the United States. For Mussolini, the military struggle now went quickly from bad to worse. By May , Italian forces had to surrender all of Libya, their last foothold in Africa. In July , a huge Anglo-American amphibious force invaded Sicily. The Duce’s dictatorship now faced its greatest crisis. In Rome, interlocking conspiracies involving Fascist hierarchs, who included, among others, Dino Grandi and Count Ciano, as well as the King and Army leaders, led to the coup d’état of July . The sickly Duce was easily arrested. His Fascist regime and Corporative State crumbled apart amid mass jubilation. In its place emerged a new royal dictatorship headed by King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio. Six weeks later, this new government signed an armistice with the Anglo-Americans in Sicily. The armistice was suddenly announced late in the night of – September, just as Allied forces were landing on the mainland at Salerno. With Allied help, the poverty-stricken southern half of Italy, now dubbed the “Kingdom of the South,” slowly began to re-establish the democratic parties and institutions of the pre-Fascist era. Within a few weeks, the Allies recognized the liberated South as a “co-belligerent” on their side. But in the northern, more industrialized half of Italy, the story was very diff erent. Immediately after the coup d’état in Rome on July , Hitler had anticipated that the Badoglio government would defect from the Axis. Consequently, he had dispatched massive German forces across the Brenner Pass. When Italy’s armistice was clumsily announced during the night of September , Hitler’s forces quickly overwhelmed and disarmed the bewildered Italian units. Simultaneously, Nazi commandos rescued Mussolini from the Apennine ski lodge where the Badoglio government had confined him. Hitler peremptorily ordered the ex-dictator to form a new Fascist government under the strict supervision of the Nazi SS. This miserable, -months epilogue to Mussolini’s Fascism was known as the Italian Social Republic, or more commonly as the “Republic of Salò,” which took its name from the resort on Lake Garda, where the Duce improvised his headquarters. Soon, Mussolini ordered a trial in Verona of those Fascist hierarchs, who, in July, had dared to vote against him. Most of them, including his own son-in-law, Count Ciano, were executed by a firing squad.
See F. William Deakin, The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler, and the Fall of Italian Fascism (New York: Harper & Row, ).
The Duce’s puppet regime ordered conscription of new armies and labor forces to help the Third Reich. He also tried, demagogically, to win the support of northern industrial workers by reverting to Fascism’s radical program of . But in vain, because most of the workers were now looking instead to the anti-Fascist Armed Resistance, which, after September , was mushrooming throughout the north. The Armed Resistance was coordinated by Committees of National Liberation that were composed of resurgent anti-Fascist political parties: Communists, Socialists, Actionists, Christian Democrats, and Liberals. The Resistance forces, which often received supply drops from the Allies, played a significant role in liberating many of Italy’s northern cities in the final days of the war. In April , when Allied forces had at last crossed the Po River, an Italian Resistance unit near Lake Como captured Mussolini and his dwindling band of last-ditch supporters who were desperately seeking to escape with a retreating German convoy. A few hours later, on April, a Communist partisan leader who was sent up to Lake Como from Resistance headquarters in Milan executed Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci. Other captured Fascist leaders were executed nearby. Next day, the bodies were hauled to central Milan. There, in a disgusting scene, a mob strung up the corpses of the ex-dictator and his mistress by their heels in Piazzale Loreto; the same square in which the Fascists had executed fifteen captured partisans a few months before. Thus, in the very city in which the Fascist movement had been born in March , Italy’s by now thoroughly despised Fascist regime reached its violent and sordid end in April .
Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies: The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance , Part II.
The Origins and Development of the Fascist Right in Germany and a Critique of the Methods Used to Contain It by Anthony Glees . Introduction: German Fascism in
Since October , when Germany again became a nation, but particularly after the summer of , racist violence has increased. At times, this increase is attributed to “right wing extremists”; on other occasions, to “fascists.” My essay seeks to explain fascism primarily in terms of organized political activity that opposes the processes of liberal democracy, acts violently, and preaches racism. We shall see that there is no difficulty in calling current German extreme right-wing behavior “fascist.” Fascism, traditionally, has been described in terms of its virulent nationalism and of its opposition to Marxism and Bolshevism. Today, however, Marxism and Bolshevism are virtually dead. Yet German fascism, and other fascist movements, still live. Although residual resentment of communism may inspire some to political action, present-day German fascism is motivated by something other than active anti-communism. After all that has happened in this century, it is remarkable that there should be a right-wing extremist problem in Germany. German fascism’s claim to the ethnic superiority of Germans gives it political continuity. The core tenet of German fascism is racialism, rather than anti-Bolshevism. In the s and s, what distinguished German fascism from the fascism of other western European states was the insistence that the German “race” was superior to other “races,” in particular, to the Jewish “race.” The evidence compiled since , and especially today, indicates that the same views are still held by German fascists. It is more than mere coincidence that German national unity has led to increased fascist activity in Germany. For many Germans, this observation has prompted a discussion of the German quality of fascism. While all European nations are currently su ff ering from its re-appearance and the case of Germany should not cause us particular alarm, the Germanspecific nature of German fascism has generated an increase in sympathy for it within Germany. For those not concerned with German a ff airs, its fascism may not require a response that is any di ff erent from the response to fascism anywhere else, including the United Kingdom. Those who do have a special interest in Germany, however, must regard German
fascism in a special light, because, historically, fascism in Germany has meant something particular. The notions of German “superiority” and of “ethnic other,” as triggers to violent political action, did not die with Hitler, who most powerfully articulated it. If German fascism is still able to exploit “ethnic other,” then existing methods of suppression (which, as we shall see, simply follow procedures that before were tried but failed) must be strengthened by ethical and moral action, along with political and economic measures. We need to re-imagine the Europe that confronts us on the threshold of the twenty-first century; to re-invent the values that make liberal democracy the most successful form of government; and to re-state the case for transnational and supranational cooperation as an antidote to the virulence of aggressive pseudo-nationalism. We must not only uphold the rights of mankind by legal and political means, we must also learn to act decently towards each other, regardless of race or social position. . The Debate on the Ideological Roots of German Fascism
What is German fascism? Is it Nazism? It seems fair to state that there were many varieties of German fascism, but that Nazism quickly gained leadership over them. After , the terms, “German fascism” and “National Socialism” or “Nazism” have been used synonymously. Yet National Socialism was but one expression of German fascism. What were its intellectual or ideological roots? If German fascism was simply a variant of European fascism, then these alleged roots would have little significance, unless they led directly to the growth of fascism in nations other than Germany. If, however, German fascism is unique, then its origins become important. It has long been established that “National Socialism was not an accident of German history. Rather it was the terminus of a broad and invitingly laid-out path. . . Hitler’s rise to power did not initiate the crisis; it made it apparent. . . the political and economic conditions of the Weimar Republic. . . destroyed the forces of resistance and thus enabled the disease [which had] a long incubation period, to speed so speedily. . . .” Indeed, for Hermann Glaser, Hitler’s personal contribution to the rise of Nazism should not be exaggerated: “the crisis would have come to a head even without Hitler. . . .it would have taken prolonged therapy to neutralize the poisonous seeds of the th and th centuries.” Herman Glaser, The Cultural Roots of National Socialism , (London: Croom Helm, ), pp. , .
We cannot say with certainty that Nazism was the only and inevitable outcome of the tradition of German nationalist political thought. That it did not come out of the blue, however, seems obvious: the roots of fascism go deep and it would be surprising if they had died out without trace. The existence of intellectual roots to German Fascism does not imply that th century German philosophers are to “blame” for its excesses, or that its appeal was, and is, intellectual. Nevertheless, one sinister feature of ethnic hatred is that over the years, many attempts have been made to justify it on rational or scientific grounds. More to the point, and perhaps more frightening than the notion of an intellectual heritage that has generated continuity, students of contemporary German fascism must evaluate the academic discussion of the German-speci fic nature of German fascism, the so-called Historikerstreit of the middle and late s. One of several striking features of the recent German attempt to reinterpret German fascism was a lack of new factual material. What was new were the extreme and inconsistent interpretations of German fascism, along with the unsavory political impact on German life that they generated. Fascism, which includes the German, Italian and French variants, has been defined by the controversial German historian, Ernst Nolte, as anti-Marxist radicalism, which propounds what he calls “national self assertion.” Nolte concluded that “Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical. . . methods, always, however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy.” This definition has been widely accepted, and a number of scholars argue that its racialism, culminating in the Holocaust, must occupy a central place in its definition. The theory and practice of genocide must set German fascism apart from other European ones, even if other fascist movements went happily along with German plans. German fascism was the motor for genocide, although non-German nationalities often supplied the means. German fascism also has had a particular relationship with democracy as a form of government. It had the capacity to operate within the democratic political system, while at the same time seeking to destroy that system; it was, thus, both revolutionary and yet also quasidemocratic. Prior to its seizure of power in , and subsequently, German fascism sought and gained popular support, particularly for its Ernst Nolte, The Three Faces of Fascism , translated by Leila Vennewitz (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, ), pp. , –.
leader, Hitler. After , the Nazis were obliged to “use democracy to destroy democracy.” The fact that a party has participated or does participate in what seems to be normal democratic activity, therefore, does not imply that it does not seek the overthrow of liberal democracy. As Hitler himself made clear in a speech in September , Nazis needed to “educate the German people to fight against the idiotic systems of democracy and parliamentarianism. In the s, German fascism tended to be seen, particularly by German scholars, simply as a variant of European fascism, which opposed democracy and communism. By the s, German scholars began to reevaluate German fascism. They concluded that communism was not the opposite of fascism: both fascism and communism were complementary, and the real opposition occurred between liberalism and totalitarianism. This new perspective, which was developed by academics and politicians, actually helped to promote a revival of fascism. German fascism was no longer considered as uniquely German, and fascism itself was viewed as another form of the other vile totalitarianism, communism. . The Uniqueness of German Fascism: the Question of Genocide
One problem raised by the German historians’ debate, the Historikerstreit , is also a central concern of this essay: the uniqueness of German fascism. Twenty years earlier, Ernst Nolte had already argued that fascism was the product of a distinct epoch, not tied specifically to Germany. Although his book o ff ended many persons who were accustomed to the more simplistic and convenient analysis that fascism was Italo/German and a by-product of the political failures of these two nations, the validity of a comparative analysis of the phenomenon is now wholly accepted. The debt that Hitler owed to Italian Fascism was plain, as Hitler himself demonstrated in private and public until Mussolini’s death. In the s, however, the debate focused on the central ideological platform of Nazism, the war of genocide. For German historians, the issue at stake was whether genocide, as practiced by the Nazis, was a specifically German phenomenon, or whether it was part of a wider abuse of political power, common to other totalitarian movements. How central was it to the theory and practice of German fascism? If, on the one hand, the war against the Jews was a German invention, then the consequences for the interpretation of German political development were dire. If, on the other hand, the war of genocide was but a German Quoted by Alan Bullock in Hitler (Dusseldorf: Droste, ), p. .
example of a wider practice, then it was wrong to attribute special blame to Germany. Such an assertion implied the relativisation of Nazism. It was not coincidental that the loudest voice pleading for the revision of the German-specific view of Nazism was that of Ernst Nolte, who was about to publish Der Europaeische Buergerkrieg – . Here he argued that Nazism both learned from Soviet Communism and reacted against it. He suggested further that Nazi genocide was to be understood as a preemptive strike against putative Soviet genocide against Germans. There was no new real evidence to back up these surprising assertions, but his interpretations had both academic and political consequences. The statement that “Hitler was no worse than Stalin” would be taken, in Germany, to mean not that both men and both states were equally evil; but that the Germans of the Third Reich and the German polity were not uniquely evil. They, therefore, were less evil than has been suggested. And if the Germans of the Third Reich and the German polity were not uniquely evil, it might follow that aspects of the Third Reich were actually positive. Indeed, Nolte argued in favor of a more positive reinterpretation of the Third Reich by using this analogy. Had the PLO destroyed Israel, he contended, its history of Israel would have merely catalogued the negative aspects of Israeli history. He did not say so explicitly, but his meaning was plain: until now German history has been written from the point of view of those who defeated the Third Reich. Thus its “negativeness” has never been “expressed in a di ff erent way.” Nolte was strongly supported by the late Andreas Hillgruber and J. C. Fest, an influential senior editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . They suggested, first, that genocide, that is, the extermination of an ethnic group and of an economic or social class, was a relatively common phenomenon in central and eastern Europe. “Genocide” signi fied “Asiatic” rather than “European” behavior. Second, they proposed that both the notion and the trigger for genocide came from the Russian Communists. Nolte even asserted that Hitler’s anti-Semitic measures before were justified, because in , Chaim Weizmann had said that Jews would fight on England’s side; this statement “entitled Hitler to treat Jews as prisoners of war.” One of the outcomes of the debate was a highlighting of the central importance of genocide for an interpretation of German fascism. Was German fascism truly no more than a political response to Marxism; or E. Nolte, Der Europaeische Burgerkrieg – : Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Berlin: Propylaen Verlag, ), pp. , , , , , –, .
was its obsession with race and an ethnically regulated “New Order in Europe” as important, or even more important, than its anti-Marxism? Is there any evidence to suggest that historians may have underplayed the ethnic aspects of Nazism and overplayed its anti-Marxist ones? The answers to these questions are vital. If ethnicity can be demonstrated to have been more signi ficant than we have assumed in the past, then the dangers of current ethnically driven political behavior become even more serious. Furthermore, if this is so, then the demise of political Marxism in Europe after does not mean that today’s German right-wing extremism cannot be fascist. It is its ethnicity that provides the historical continuity between the phenomenon we see today, and what occurred during the period between the wars. It can be argued plausibly that race is more important in explaining Nazism than is anti-Marxism. Today’s German hostility towards “foreigners” replicates the Nazis’ concern with ethnic others. This may seem a statement of the obvious, because anti-Semitism has often been the focus of academic and public interest in Nazism. Although there always has been an understanding that for the Nazis, the concept of race was central, this understanding was always qualified by the widespread belief that the concept itself was meaningless; as meaningless as the Nazi notion of the “Aryan.” Nazi racialism was thus often reduced not to the opposition “German/ethnically other” but to “Aryan/Jew”, and also seen as something inherently crazy, even idiosyncratic, the product of a few, mad, leading Nazis. We shall see that although in the ls and subsequently, “the Jews” were considered by the Nazis to be the least acceptable ethnic group, the Jews were not the only ethnic group believed inferior to the “Aryans.” Both before and after, race, then, lay at the very heart of Nazism. Nowhere is this fact seen more clearly than in the views expressed by Hitler. The idea of ethnicity as a trigger for violent political action, however, did not die with Hitler, even if he most powerfully articulated it. . Hitler and Genocide
Nolte and his allies were o ff ering not merely a reinterpretation, but also a rehabilitation of Hitler’s image. Some historians insisted that Hitler and his closest comrades played a secondary and subsidiary role in theprocess of genocide. The impact, which such theories might have on German political life, is plain: if Hitler was wicked primarily because he had ordered the extermination of the Jews and if this claim was not true, then Hitler might not be as wicked as had been alleged. Fest, approvingly, showed that both Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen had proved that
the Nazi leaders had not opted for extermination at the beginning of their period in power, but were “prisoners in a process which their phraseology, their laws and a complex of activities had set in motion.” Mommsen even argued that although “his fanatical hatred of Jews was of decisive importance for Hitler’s general political conduct. . . he did not show much interest, and certainly no active involvement, in the individual steps of anti-Jewish policy. . . In general, he would avoid committing himself directly to anti-Jewish actions, especially since he was aware that these were received rather negatively by the German people.” We learn that “Hitler never sympathized with the course of excluding the Jews from social life by legislative means” which was executed by “bureaucrats.” Mommsen quoted from Gerald Fleming’s and David Irving’s work to suggest that Hitler avoided any direct “identification” with genocide and that it was never discussed in his immediate circle. Mommsen alleged that there was no order from Hitler to exterminate Jews. Most non-German scholars were entitled to be shocked by these overelaborate theories. After all, Hitler never concealed his aim of destroying the Jews. The supposition that there is no direct order linking him with the technical achievement of the “ final solution” may be explained by the need for utmost secrecy in realizing it: Hitler clearly believed that genocide was the right policy for the Third Reich. He was never wholly certain that the German people would support him on it. Himmler, who did not balk at speaking to his SS men about the policy of genocide, also made it quite clear that the Nazis wished it to be a secret policy whose history would never be written. Hitler’s views on ethnicity may well have been one of his most significant contributions to German fascism. He articulated them with such great conviction and force that they became part of it. Genocide, moreover, was German-specific. In short, German fascism was a German variant of a European phenomenon, wherein the ethnic superiority of the German Aryan and the desire to exterminate the Jews were the key components. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was speci fically German-Austrian, while also fitting into a wider European context: German fascism does not need to be feared any more, or any less, than other fascisms, which incite citizens to ethnic violence and bloodshed. Central to Hitler’s thought were the notions of German ethnic superiority and the need to subject Jews to “racial cleansing.” In , he Hans Mommsen, “Anti-Jewish Policies,” in Hedley Bull, ed., The Challenge of the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. ff ., , –, .
told a Munich journalist that “when I really am in power, then the annihilation of the Jews will be my first and most important task. As soon as I have the power to do it, I shall, for example, have erected in the Marienplatz in Munich gallows and more gallows. . . The Jews will be hanged, one after the other, and they will stay hanging until they stink. They will hang as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been taken down, the next ones will be strung up and this will continue until the last Jew in Munich is destroyed. The same will happen in other German cities until Germany is cleansed of the last Jews.” The content of his speech of January followed directly: “if international finance Jews outside Europe succeed in pushing the German people again into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of the Jews but the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.” This passage was often quoted by Hitler. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not marginal, but central to his public and private acts as Germany’s political leader. Hitler tells us where he thinks he picked the idea up, but even if, as seems unlikely, Hitler got the idea of extermination from the Bolsheviks or Turks, this hardly contradicts the German character of genocide or exonerates German political development from complicity in it. Furthermore, it was a doctrine shared by his paladins and more widely in Germany and German Austria at the time. Hitler begins the very first page of Mein Kampf with a statement of the significance of ethnic bonding amongst Germans. He also gives it a foreign policy value: “German-Austria must be returned to its great German motherland and not for economic reasons. No, no. Even if this union—in economic terms—had no impact, yes even if it was economically harmful, it would still have to take place. The same blood [written in emphasis] belongs in the same Reich. . .”. Mein Kampf also off ers early insights into Hitler’s anti-Semitism. He learned it in Vienna rather than at home or at school (or Munich): “it was only when I was fourteen or fifteen that I came across the term ‘Jew,’ often in a political context. I experienced mild feelings of unease. . . Linz had few Jews. Externally they become Europeanized Quoted in Charles Bracelan Flood, Hitler (London: Hamish Hamilton, ), p. . Speech printed in Max Domarus, Hitler Reden und Proklamationen , ii, (Munich: ), pp. ff . Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf , translated by Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., ), p. .
and human [menschlich ]; indeed, I held them to be Germans. . . And then I went to Vienna. . . which has a population of two hundred thousands of them. . .” He concludes: “Was there ever some wickedness, some act of shamelessness in one form or another, particularly in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not play a part? Even as one might cut cautiously into a cyst, one would find, like a maggot in a rotting corpse, quite often blinded by the sudden light, a little Jew. . .” Hitler later adds that during the First World War, he preferred to hide behind trees rather than salute Jewish o fficers. After the war, his hatred of the Jews became an integral part of his political message. There is no real evidence that those who flocked to listen to him were unsettled by what he had to say. In , for example, when Walter Rathenau was made foreign minister, Hitler told a crowd of Bavarians that the appointment of a Jewish foreign minister was simply unacceptable to true Germans and then, in the same breath, called for the capital punishment of all Jews who “polluted” Aryan girls. The audience showed their approval by chanting “Rathenau—Judensau” which, though hardly eloquent, nevertheless served to demonstrate clearly that they liked what Hitler was saying. Hitler believed that his anti-Semitism was popular. Certainly, Nazis and others involved in the execution of genocide seemed content with the policy. For Hitler personally and his version of fascism, anti-Semitism occupied a central place. Most of what he sought to do, whether inside Germany or beyond its frontiers, was motivated by a desire to destroy the Jews of Europe. Hitler’s earliest statements to his first policies in government (the burning of books, the purging of political institutions), to the plans for genocide and the accompanying war on the Soviet Union, demonstrate that genocide was a necessity. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was thus a key contribution to the shaping of German fascism. In , other German fascists might have won power if Hitler had been dead or in prison, and they might have been less keen on genocide. Yet the fact is that it was Hitler and no other Fascist leader who was successful. Hitler never changed his views on Jews. Indeed, during his entire political career, there is a remarkable consistency about what he said and wrote about Jews. Almost twenty years after his outpourings in Mein Kampf , he could still tell his dinner-table circle that Jews were a virus and that the work the Nazis were doing in exterminating them was on a par with the achievement of Louis Pasteur. In his final will and testament of April , Hitler repeated his belief that the war had been caused by the Jews and not by him.
. Anti-Semitism as the Expression of German Ethnic Superiority
Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer and later in charge of German-occupied Poland, was seen by early contemporaries as a “well educated attorney, highly cultured and cultivated.” He, too, had a clear vision of what he regarded as the necessity of ethnic cleansing. Hans Frank informed a Nazi journalist, a visitor from Berlin, “If I were to have one poster printed for every seven Poles I’m going to have shot, all the trees in Poland couldn’t provide the paper. . . After the war, you can make mincemeat out of the Poles and Ukrainians and anybody else hanging around here as far as I am concerned.” He told a gathering that “we must obliterate the Jews wherever we can find them and wherever the opportunity is aff orded us. . . We cannot shoot the . million of them, we cannot kill them with poison but can proceed with the necessary steps which somehow or other will lead to their successful extermination.” On August , he spoke to German troops and a delegation of Polish and Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers. He thanked Hitler for having given him control of “this ancient nest of Jews. . . Once, there were thousands of Jews, hideously repulsive Jews, but now I can’t seem to find any. Don’t tell me you’ve been treating them badly. . .” The stenographer noted that the audience reacted to these remarks with “great hilarity.” Heinrich Himmler explicitly recognized that genocide would be supported, if it were presented as an act of “ethnic cleansing.” Even so, he believed, many Nazis might be unwilling to see policy converted into practice. He accepted, too, that the secrecy with which genocide was being executed, denied the SS their rightful place in German history. As he put it to his SS leadership at a speech in Posen on October : “one principle applies absolutely to every SS man: he must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of his blood but to no one else. . . if by the building of an anti-tank ditch , Russian women die is of interest to me only because the anti-tank ditch needs to be completed for Germany. . . As far as the evacuation of Jews is concerned, the extermination of Jews, it belongs to the things that are easy to say. ‘The Jewish race will be exterminated,’ says every Party member ‘no question, it’s in our program, removal of Jews, extermination, we’ll do.’ And then along come million Germans and each one has their decent Jew. It’s clear—the other Jews are swine but this one is a tip-top Jew. But none of those who speak in this way has watched, has had to stand through what you have stood through. Most of you know what it means if bodies lie there, if or are there and you, apart from acts Gerald Posner, Hitler’s Children (London: Mandarin, ), pp. , , , .
of human weakness, have remained decent. That has made us hard. That is a glorious chapter of our history that has never been written and never will be.” Himmler’s anti-Semitism was every bit as deeply held as Hitler’s and, according to a recent biography, was not learned from Hitler but resulted from his own musings. . German Ethnic Superiority and the German People
We cannot claim that genocide was popular. It seems probable that many Germans hated it. Himmler believed that even Nazi party members might not support it. Genocide was executed under conditions of secrecy. Yet the evidence is not only that many of the peoples controlled by the Germans after , Poles, French, Dutch, Balts, Russians and so on, willingly took part in the Nazi crusade against the Jews, but that the many hundreds of thousands of Germans who became involved in the extermination process gave it their passive support, or worse. The message that the Germans were ethnically superior to the Jews seems to have been widely accepted. Interestingly, one of Hans Frank’s sons related how his mother took him to visit the Warsaw Ghetto. His testimony is a stark description of ethnic otherness. The boy asked his mother, “why the people had stars and who were the men with whips. . . And when our [official] car stopped, I looked out of the window, and an older boy was standing outside, staring at me. . . And I made faces at him, he looked very sad and then ran away. . .”. The imposed and invented ethnic otherness of Jews was also picked up by quite ordinary, even simple Germans who were Nazi supporters. A war diary, kept by a simple Luftwa ff e officer, Juergen Flick, made the following entry for March : “Visit to Warsaw. . . I repeatedly found myself coming up against the walls of the Ghetto and decided to see it. The tram is the only way; it travels through the Ghetto without stopping. The impression I retain is very strong. I’ve never seen anything like it—people [Menschen] sealed off from other people by walls and gates. How justified it is that they be separated like this is clear to anyone who has seen the Ghetto. Jews, just Jews, forced now to rely only on themselves. From outside you can hear the chanting of Jewish peddlers, praising their wares. . . everywhere people are haggling. Many are selling arm bands with the Jewish star and little bits of cake. The streets were full of Jews. And of the stench that goes with Jews. Jews Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (London: Bodley Head, ), p. . Posner, op. cit ., p. .
like a normal European has never seen them. Old one with beards and fatty, lumpy eyes, eyes dark with evil. Young men, without moral consciences, with hatred and wickedness etched on their foreheads. . . Corpses lie on the pavements. We went to supper to the Black Forest Restaurant. Otherwise nothing special happened today.” What is so striking about this account is not merely how unreflective it was (could he not understand that what he was seeing, that is that the misery, the poverty, the death and the hatred were the outcomes of Nazi policy and not of Jewish volition), but how fully he accepted the idea that the Jews were not like himself. At the heart of German fascism, then, there lay the idea of the superiority of the Germanic or Aryan race, along with the alleged ethnic inferiority of the Jews. Philosophers like Fichte, Arndt, Lagarde, and Treitschke gave German nationalism a spin, into which Hitler’s political thought may be fitted. Langbehn had talked about “clean, good Aryan blood; of all human bloods, it is the blood that contains the most gold.” Nazi philosophy was quick to appreciate the signi ficance of this ethnicity. Robert Ley wrote of his “two dogmas”; the first was the “natural law of blood, race, energy, courage and motherhood”; the second “the authority of the Führer, the representative of the German people. When he orders me to do something, I have to obey. . . the Führer is always right, in all situations and always.” For Himmler the “one principle of the SS man is to be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to our own blood and to no one else. . . a decent attitude to animals and will have a decent attitude to these human animals. What we care about [Sorge], our duty is our blood.” . German Nationalism and German Fascism
German nationalism was more than nationalism. Hitler himself, however, was not a nationalist in any meaningful sense. His table talk gives many clues as to where his aff ections lay: with his dogs, for old party comrades, for certain artists, musicians, and historical cities, but chiefly for young members of the armed services, especially those at the front. Hitler displays an obvious amusement for local habits and customs. At no time does he demonstrate any genuine a ff ection for those whom the Quotation from Juergen Flick, Diaries , privately published in Bremen by Arend Vollers, p. . Glaser, op. cit., p. . Quoted in Leon Poliakov and Josef Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker (Munich: K. G. Saur, ), pp. –, .
Nazis regarded as German “folk comrades” ( Volksgenossen ). Indeed, he is often found musing on how they could be regimented and even intimidated more successfully. Would a genuine nationalist have condemned his country to the sort of defeat that befell Germany? Would he have accepted such massive loss of life? Would he have proposed the establishment of baby farms and the killing of imbeciles? At first, Hitler had attempted to keep the deprivation of Germans to a minimum (and was happy to make other Europeans su ff er on their behalf); but as Germany’s defeat became inescapable, Hitler cared less and less about the horrors that he was inflicting on his countrymen. In the final analysis, even though it was not done in the same systematic way, Hitler was quite ready to see the Germans go under much as millions of non-Germans had been dispatched. . German Fascism since
We have established the central importance of the concept of ethnic superiority for German fascism before . What of the period from to the present? Since , at least twenty-five people been murdered, that is, beaten or burned to death for racial reasons, in both eastern and western Germany. According to official statistics, in there occurred racially motivated fascist attacks on individuals, in which seventeen persons were murdered, as compared with in ; an increase of per cent. In , two of the worst cases included the September attack on an asylum seekers’ hostel in Hoyerswerda, where people were injured, and the October fire-bombing of a Lebanese family’s home in Huenxe, where two children su ff ered appalling burns. The following year, some of the worst cases were the August riots in Rostock, when several hundreds of extremists, encouraged by a large crowd of spectators, attacked an asylum seekers’ hostel. In May , three Turkish women were burned to death in a fire-bomb attack on their home in Solingen in the Ruhr. In , two dozen Hamburg policemen were suspended following their attack on an immigrant wearing an anti-Nazi badge; and the Bundestag felt it necessary to pass a law punishing neo-Nazis and historians who denied the existence of the Holocaust, with up to five years in gaol. Chancellor Kohl condemned the Solingen fire-bombing but dismissed it too by suggesting it was the work of a “few weak-minded individuals.” The evidence suggests that those behaving in this way do, in fact, believe they are executing the wishes of the German people. Opinion polls in Germany have consistently shown that almost half the German
population ( per cent in the west, per cent in the east) feel “disturbed” by “foreigners” and only ten per cent fewer (in the same proportion) think “foreigners” should “get out” of Germany. It is plain that the huge influx of aliens into Germany after the collapse of Communism (numbering almost one million in ) caused very real social pressures and understandable (if not excusable) resentment. Yet what is very worrying about extremist behavior is that it finds nurture in political groupings and parties who exist within the political system but yet are able to inflame their sympathizers so that both the sympathizers and the parties are able to eschew liberal political means for articulating and addressing grievances and, ultimately, are part of process which ends in the commission of political murders. The most active radical fascist groups now include Die Republikaner, led until the summer of by Franz Schoenhuber, Rolf Schlierer, and Harald Neubauer; Die Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), led by Dr. Gerhard Frey; Die “Fascho-Skins” and Die Deutsche Alternative, led by Michael Kuehnen, now dead, Frank Huebner and Rainer Sonntag. Nevertheless, in North-Rhine Westfalia, one local study has indicated that only three to six per cent of those responsible for these racist attacks are organized skin-head associations. Yet there is no doubt that these individuals justified their actions by recourse to right-wing extremist views. In this sense, these figures imply the problem is more serious than might at first be thought, since for every organized extremist, there are as many as ten unorganized ones, prepared to act in an extremist way. Although German fascism assumes a variety of faces, it is not helpful to seek to diff erentiate between the “old” and the “new” ones. The face of today’s fascism bears a strong resemblance to Nazism. Its roots lie in National Socialism, and it repeats Nazi claims to ethnic superiority. Present-day fascists are dedicated to the promotion of the ideas of ethnic otherness and of Aryan supremacy, fundamentally indistinguishable from the notions developed in the s, but adapted to the s and propagated in appropriate ways. Public opinion polls have shown that as late as , twenty-six per cent of West Germans agreed with the statement that Nazism was basically a good idea, just poorly carried out. In , forty-eight per cent said if it had not been for the war, Hitler would have been one of the greatest German statesmen; in there were still thirty-one per cent who said this. Polls undertaken in and indicated that about thirteen per cent held fixed right wing views. Those who are on the receiving end of Fascist violence are chiefly members of the . million “foreigners” or “guestworkers” and their families,
or asylum seekers, or economic refugees from eastern and central Europe. Of these almost one-third are Turkish in origin. Sixty per cent of these people have lived in Germany for ten years or more; their legal status was changed by the nationality act which made it somewhat easier for them to become German nationals. Yet what is signi ficant about these “foreigners” is not that they are actually foreign qua foreign. Italian “guestworkers” do not appear to merit attacks, even though they constitute ten per cent of the total number of “foreigners.” As such, “foreigners” are to be considered the contemporary equivalent of the Jews of pre-war Europe, along with their surrogates. When attacking “foreigners,” German fascists are re-enacting anti-Jewish pogroms. The persons who commit the violence are no di ff erent from their antecedents in the s and later, who were members of the SA and other organizations. Nor should we forget that, for various reasons, Jews bore the brunt of Nazi racialism but were, by no means, the only recipients of it. What is genuinely frightening, therefore, is the capacity of German fascists to identify other “races” as ethnically inferior. . The Response to the Fascist Threat:
Containment, Suppression and Repression
Before and since, the actual response to the German fascist threat has been the attempted containment of German fascism by legal, police, and security service means. In , Hitler was sentenced to the minimum of five years in prison for high treason, after the abortive putsch. He was released on December . Hitler was banned from speaking in Bavaria from until May and in other Laender until September . None of this had much impact on Hitler’s political fortunes, although two qualifying statements need to be made: first, that legal means were taken su fficiently seriously by the Nazis to force them to abandon their putsch strategy and to turn to pseudoparliamentarianism, and, second, that had legal means been even tougher, Nazism could have been more successfully suppressed, certainly before . Had Hitler been executed for high treason in , German Fascism might still have come to power but led by others, whose particular contribution might have been diff erent. These measures against the Nazis were by no means the only attempt to contain German fascism by legal means. Twenty years ago I worked on the problem of the containment of fascism by the SPD, and concentrated in particular on Prussia. Prussia was important for two reasons: it was the largest Land of the Weimar Republic (of million
Germans in , some million were citizens of Prussia); and, second, from until the SPD both led and participated in the Prussian Land government (but were in the government of the Reich for roughly only four years). As Minister, Grzesinski had to address the fact that large sections of the population openly supported fascism. It should not be forgotten that there were many fascist and para-fascist organizations wooing their support. As Arnold Brecht has pointed out, “prior to , the Nazis played a minor role amongst various shades of opposition to the democratic form of government.” The Stahlhelm, Wiking and Olympia organizations did much to foster anti-Republicanism and anti-Semitism. Wiking was led by Captain Ehrhardt, an anti-Semite and ex-Freikorps leader, who demanded the creation of an ethnic “ voelkisch ” Germany. On April , Wiking and Olympia were banned and dissolved in Prussia. Grzesinski urged the Prussian police to prosecute Nazis who had attacked Jewish-looking Berliners in . He even attempted to extradite Hitler, who was still an Austrian national at this time, and to ban the Nazis. These attempts, however, proved impossible. The Stahlhelm, which by claimed , members, also proved hard to tackle. It urged all non-Jews, “Deutschstaemmige,” to join it, and named von Hindenburg as an honorary member. In October , the Stahlhelm was banned by Grzesinksi. Hindenburg then intervened: he asserted that the Stahlhelm were simply “nationally minded,” and the ban was rescinded. The resistance to these policies was enormous. Grzesinski had tried to punish a man who called the Weimar Republic’s flag a “Jew flag.” He could not get a conviction, because the judge insisted that a Jew had written Weimar’s constitution. The Stahlhelm newspaper claimed that Grzesinski was really a Jew called Cohn; it incited children to sing a song encouraging them “to defecate on the flag of the Republic.” After , legal means were again employed to contain the problem of German fascism. First, war crimes trials were designed to criminalize, punish, and make examples of Nazis; and second, fascist groups were banned and repressed. In , a storm was caused when a neo-Nazi party, the Socialist Reich Party, won percent of the vote in Lower Saxony. One of its leaders was Major Remer, who had put down the coup in Berlin. The Federal Government applied to the constitutional court with a view to gaining a ban; the court decided that the SRP was neo-Nazis, but it appears to have dissolved itself to avoid almost certain banning by the West German constitutional court. Arnold Brecht, Prelude to Silence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. .
The British took special interest in the danger of a resurgence of German fascism. They had led the hunt for Hitler, together with the NKVD, because they feared that were he alive, he might inspire a Nazi rebirth. In his memoirs, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, at that time British High Commissioner in Germany, relates how in he organized the arrest of Dr. Naumann, formerly Goebbels’s state secretary, who was trying to enter German politics via the Free Democratic party. Having tried to enlist Adenauer’s help, Kirkpatrick then decided to act on his own authority (the west Germans were still subject to their victors for matters aff ecting German security). In , four organizations were banned as o ff ending against paragraph of the German Constitution. Three of them were national groupings; one confined to Lower Saxony. These were the National Front (banned on November ), the German Alternative (banned on December ), the National Off ensive (banned on December ), and the German Comrades Association (banned on December ). The Government in Bonn, citing article of the German Constitution, also acted against individual fascists. On September , the German Interior Minister announced that he was seeking to ban the “Free German Workers’ Party” (FAP) and that Bavaria, Hesse, and Lower Saxony had announced similar policies. On the same day, the Land of North Rhine-Westfalia banned another splinter group, the FFD. Legally, a party can be banned only by an application of the Federal Government to the Constitutional Court, although associations can be banned by Laender governments. Also on this day, Joerg Petritsch, the lead singer of the pop group Stoerkraft, was sentenced to two years suspended gaol for having shouted “Sieg Heil” to his fans at gigs and for singing a song with the following lines “We are Germany’s right [wing] police; we will clear up the streets.” On May , David Irving was fined DM . in Munich and banned from speaking in Berlin on May and in Sindelfingen on May. . Conclusion
There are, however, serious problems with such courses of action, as the history of the Weimar demonstrates. First, measures to criminalize and to suppress may back fire. They may be viewed as repression which itself, in a democracy, can fuel further discontent. Second, it has been argued by German political scientists and others that German fascism has been taken too seriously by both German authorities and Germany’s partners. This criticism was made before . Richard Stoess argues
that since German fascism today is not the same as it was in the s and s, there is no point in seeking to suppress it: the only e ff ect such containment would have, would be the suppression of democratic activity, which would undermine the values of German democracy. The real threat to democracy, Stoess says, comes not from German fascist violence but from the “dismantling of democratic rights.” Bans are “are highly problematic in terms of democratic theory” and are just as “ineff ective as other administrative sanctions in overcoming the real causes of right wing extremism.” Yet he concedes that banning does make it harder for extremists to join right wing organizations and can therefore be justified. The difficulty with Stoess’s liberal argument is that it uses democratic theory to combat anti-democrats. It can be argued that the legal means of the s failed, not because they were too harsh, but because they were not harsh enough. Liberal democracy cannot allow its opponents to utilize the benefits of free speech and free assembly as weapons to overthrow democracy. It is impossible to ignore the lessons of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, even though Bonn/Berlin is certainly not Weimar. The situations are diff erent in almost every respect, save the presence of German fascism and the unleashing of German national energies. Nor may we forget the fact that by in Germany, a liberal democracy could be quickly undermined by fascism. German fascism has been able to exploit weaknesses in German political life, which were in part the result of national unification in and in part the outcome of the failure of the great, democratic, German parties: a failure not merely to act decisively against fascism, but also to develop a coherent strategy for acting against it. Firm legal measures against fascist activity are certainly called for; but so are measures designed to take on the underlying forces militating in favor of fascism. Some of these forces cannot ever be contained, let alone defeated. Germany remains the prisoner of its own history. Yet a re-statement is needed of the values of liberal democracy, along with an explanation of why liberal democracy provides an answer to the needs of the st century. The crazy notion of ethnic superiority must be exposed. Fascism is not just a German problem; it was, and remains, a problem that is common to all European political cultures. The whole of Europe needs to rise to the challenge that it poses.
Richard Stoess, Politics against Democracy: Right Wing Extremism in West Ger- many (New York; Oxford: Berg, ), pp. , , –.
Prelude to Disaster: The Evolution of Austrian Fascism by Bruce F. Pauley
Austria’s importance in the history of fascism far outweighs its small size: , square miles and . million people. Its Nazi Party was founded nearly sixteen years earlier than its German counterpart which Hitler joined in . The Austrian NSDAP was proportionately larger than the German party until at least , and produced such luminaries as Adolf Eichmann, who was put in charge of deporting Jews from the entire Reich in , and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Nazis’ secret police after . Austrians comprised percent of Eichmann’s staff and were associated with half the murders of the Holocaust (of whom , were Austrian Jews). Three-quarters of the commandants of the Nazi extermination camps, as well as percent of their staff s, were Austrians. The Austrian Nazis were not that country’s only fascists. Austria’s location on the crossroads of Europe made it a veritable laboratory for diff erent types of fascism. Most of the Austrian Nazis looked north for their inspiration and leadership and passionately favored a union or Anschluss between Germany and Austria. But the equally fascist, if lesser known, paramilitary Heimwehr , or Home Guard, looked to Mussolini and Fascist Italy for financial and moral support. Most of its members favored Austria’s independence. Like most other European fascists, those in Austria claimed to represent a “movement of renewal,” which would reunite their socially divided people into a “people’s community or Volksgemeinschaft . To this end they developed a number of subsidiary organizations to appeal to both genders and a wide variety of occupational groups. Their strongest support, however, came from the middle class and peasantry. Again, like fascists elsewhere, the Austrian fascists stressed the value of emotion and sentiment over reason, of action instead of words, and of violence in place of peace. They were passionately opposed to liberalism, parliamentarianism, individualism, and especially to Marxism, which included both socialism and communism. Austrian fascists, like nearly all other fascists, were more or less anti-Semitic. Because Austrian fascists deliberately appealed to a wide spectrum of social and political groups, any specific program of action, which they might propose before gaining power, was almost certain to destroy the tenuous bonds that held their movement together. Consequently, positive programs which stated clear principles were avoided; propaganda was directed instead
against nearly universally hated phenomena, such as the post-World War I Paris Peace Treaties, crime in the streets, political corruption, economic crises, and the Jews. . The Historical Foundations of Austrian Fascism
All of the components which later were to constitute fascism could be found prior to the First World War in the Habsburg Monarchy. In Austria, as well as in other European countries, religious anti-Semitism can be traced to the beginning of the Middle Ages, if not to Antiquity. In its more modern, political, and especially racial form, however, it dates only from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. By the late s, Austrian university students, organized in so-called Burschenschaften or fraternities, were already espousing a new creed of racial anti-Semitism that was imported from Germany at the very time when Jewish enrollments in Austrian universities were exploding. By the eve of the First World War, Jews made up over a quarter of the students at the University of Vienna and by , over percent. Most university students rejected religious anti-Judaism as reactionary and unenlightened. Racial anti-Semitism seemed modern and scienti fic. Moreover, the treatment of Jews as a separate race and not merely as belonging to a diff erent religion, would eliminate the opportunities for social and economic advancement which Jews had enjoyed in Central Europe when they converted to Christianity. Universities were by no means the only source of modern, racial, and political anti-Semitism in fi n-de-siècle Austria: another was the panGerman politician, Georg von Schönerer. In , he advocated in the so-called Linz Declaration “the removal of Jewish in fluence from all sections of public life.” Why did Schönerer suddenly develop such a strong aversion to Jews? The answer may lie in the broadening of the franchise in , which Schönerer himself promoted. The new franchise tripled the number of voters in Vienna. The primary bene ficiaries were anti-capitalistic artisans, who regarded big business and mass producing industries, where Jews were highly overrepresented, as threats to their economic well-being. The sudden rise of political anti-Semitism after was a result of the partial democratization of Austrian politics. Schönerer was not alone among the politicians who now tried to appeal to the new voters through anti-elitist, anti-individualist, and anti-intellectual demagoguery. Schönerer, one of Hitler’s childhood heroes, thought of himself as a German messiah. He was known as the Führer of his Pan-German Party,
and he called for the union of all German-speaking people. Schönerer denounced Jews on “racial” grounds and demanded unconditional obedience from his followers, an obedience which, later on, would also be enjoined by all Austrian fascist leaders. A quite diff erent form of anti-Semitism, which emerged in late nineteenth-century Austria, was the cultural type favored by the Viennese mayor and founder of the Christian Social Party, Dr. Karl Lueger. Like Schönerer, he used anti-Semitism to appeal to the same unstable groups: artisans and university students, which forty years later would be greatly overrepresented in the Austrian Nazi Party. Lueger also favored political platforms that denounced the emancipation of Jews. For half a century, Lueger’s old-fashioned brand of religious, cultural, and economic anti-Semitism remained the integrating force of political Catholicism, because it was far more in accord with Viennese traditions than was Schönerer’s more modern racial anti-Semitism. Together, Schönerer and Lueger demonstrated the appeal of antiSemitism to the masses, especially to lower middle-class artisans. To suggest, however, that a straight line could be drawn between the anti-Semitism of these two men and post-World War I Austrian fascism would be a mistake. In , Lueger’s election coincided with the return of prosperity that undermined the roots of economic antiSemitism. Lueger himself referred to anti-Semitism as “an excellent means of getting ahead in politics, but after one [had] arrived, one [could] not use it any longer. . .” Consequently, during his thirteen years in office, Jews suff ered no discriminatory legislation, were faced with no mass violence and experienced little physical abuse. Unfortunately, one generation later, many Austrian Jews believed that Hitler would follow in Lueger’s footsteps. Another, completely diff erent source of Austrian fascism lay in the country’s authoritarian tradition and its imperfect democratization prior to the World War. Except for the brief interlude during the Revolutions of , Austria was an absolute monarchy up to the s. Finally, in , after two failed constitutions, the Habsburg Monarchy was divided into a Hungarian and Austrian dual state, with Austria receiving its first permanent constitution guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens, including Jews. Even then, the franchise was severely restricted, until it was broadened in and most especially in , when it included all males over the age of twenty-four. However, these actions Quoted in Robert A. Kann, A Study in Austrian Intellectual History: from the Late Baroque to Romanticism (New York: Praeger, ), p. n.
served only to increase nationalism among the Monarchy’s dozen or so ethnic groups. Nowhere was this national competition more obvious than in the country’s Parliament or Reichsrat that was divided into twenty-eight factions and seventeen major parties, all but two of which limited their appeal to just one nationality. Collectively, the parties were even less responsible than before the reform. The new Lower House degenerated into little more than a circus, where the delegates tried to drown each other out with shouts and noisemakers. The spectacle only discredited parliamentary democracy, especially in the eyes of one of its witnesses, Hitler. The state machinery was only able to continue with the help of the well-oiled civil bureaucracy and a partial return of Emperor Franz Joseph’s absolutistic powers, which he had surrendered over four decades earlier. . The Impact of the First World War
The Great War of – provided the final ingredients for the rise of Austrian fascism by reviving anti-Semitism, in flaming nationalism, and impoverishing the new republic that emerged from the ruins of the Austrian Empire. The World War vastly accelerated the migration of Jews from the eastern and more backward provinces of the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy—Galicia and Bukovina—to Vienna, where in a matter of months the city’s Jewish population increased by as much as ,, or almost percent. This population explosion, consisting mainly of penniless peddlers, artisans, and cattle dealers, was caused mostly by the Russian invasion of northeastern Austria at the beginning of the war. The usually ultra-Orthodox Jewish inhabitants of what was once (and became later) the southern part of Poland, were well aware of the anti-Semitic policies of the Russian government and fled their homelands in terror. Unfortunately, their arrival in Vienna only aggravated the wartime shortages of housing, food, and fuel. By –, most of the problems of the war and early postwar period were being blamed on the Eastern Jews, even though by that time all but about , of them had returned to their homelands, leaving the city with , Jews or . percent of the population in . It was between the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy in and the establishment of the “corporative state” by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfus in that anti-Semitism enjoyed its most luxuriant expressions. Freedom of speech and assembly also meant freedom to shout anti-Semitic slogans, to defame “das Judentum ” in the press, and to hold massive antiSemitic demonstrations. However much democracy may have made the
expression of anti-Semitic sentiments easier, it was not the primary cause of anti-Semitism. On the contrary, anti-Semites were the enemies of democracy. In general, Austrians who were the strongest supporters of democracy were the least likely to be anti-Semitic, and in some cases they were philo-Semitic. Those people who were the most fanatically anti-Semitic were also the most likely to be arch-enemies of democracy, and the most likely candidates for fascism. . Crippled from Birth:
the Early Years of the First Austrian Republic
Although the new state bore a faint resemblance to the medieval crownlands that belonged to the Habsburgs before , it was in reality a new and, to most of its citizens, an unwelcome creation. For German-Austrians, their state represented not liberation, but punishment for losing the war. That the victorious Western powers regarded the German-Austrians as a vanquished foe was only too apparent from their treatment at the Paris Peace Conference. The Treaty of St. Germain, which officially ended the war between Austria and the Allies, was far harsher than the Treaty of Versailles. In contrast to Germany, which had lost only about percent of its territory and population, Austria was forced to cede all but percent of the territory of just the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and all but percent of its former population. Austria lost not only all of its outlying and predominantly non-German-speaking provinces, but also territories inhabited by about . million German-Austrians, , of whom lived just across its new boundaries. Even though nearly every Austrian was adversely a ff ected by the breakup of the Habsburg Monarchy, the middle class was by far the hardest-hit social group, because it had made up the largest proportion of civil and military servants in the Empire. An administrative personnel, which had been too large even for the million people living in just the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy, now served a state with only . million inhabitants. Thousands of surplus civil servants were dismissed as a condition for Austria receiving a loan of $ million from the British, French, and Czechoslovakian governments in . Thus, one of the major ingredients of a successful democracy—a strong, prosperous, and self-confident middle class—was missing in Austria between the world wars. The proletarianization of the middle class, or at least the fear of becoming proletarian, which was aggravated by hyper-inflation during the early ls and the depression of the s,
made the Austrian bourgeoisie vulnerable to political extremism and National Socialism. Difficult as its economic problems were, an even worse dilemma for the young Austrian Republic was the repudiation of its very existence by the majority of its citizens. It was this rejection, more than any other factor, that later aided the Nazis’ cause. The heart and soul of the Austrian Nazis’ program was their desire for a union with Germany, something which was forbidden by the Treaty of St. Germain and the Treaty of Versailles. Far from creating the issue, however, or even monopolizing it, the Nazis merely succeeded in exploiting its value more eff ectively than any other Austrian party. Major flaws in the new Austrian constitution of also weakened democracy. It contributed to the growth of fascism by decentralizing the country and according the federal states a wide degree of local autonomy. Vienna was separated from Lower Austria and became one of the nine states. Its large working-class population enabled the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) to dominate the government and to enact Western Europe’s most advanced social welfare program, which was largely paid for by the taxes of Vienna’s middle and upper classes. The bourgeoisie, already stunned by the passing of the Monarchy and its own relative impoverishment and unemployment, were horrified that the dreaded Socialists were now in positions of authority. But what alarmed them still more was the Social Democrats’ radical rhetoric. In Austria, in contrast to most other postwar European countries, a split between Socialists and Communists, for all practical purposes, never occurred, making the Social Democrats the most leftist of any party west of the Soviet Union. Most of the radicals stayed in the SDAP, by being appeased with a large dose of hard-line Marxist slogans about class warfare and the eventual dictatorship of the proletariat. Although the party was more moderate in its actual practices than its propaganda suggested, its dogmatism and rhetoric alienated the bourgeoisie and peasantry. Its elaborate, tight, and almost totalitarian organization found an admirer and follower before , in the young Hitler. The Socialists’ strident advocacy of democracy and republicanism helped the antiSocialists become anti-democratic and anti-republican. Perhaps percent of the party’s intellectual leadership was, moreover, of Jewish origins, in part because no other major Austrian party would accept Jews in leadership positions. Anti-Socialists had, thus, a new excuse to fear and to hate the party. Proportional representation in the National Assembly, the Lower House of the new Austrian Parliament, also hampered the consolidation
of democracy. The voter was required to cast his ballot for a single party list of candidates selected by the party chairman; he was denied an opportunity to vote for individual politicians. Proportional representation gave the political parties so much power that many frustrated voters, unable either to choose or to oust individual politicians, began calling Austria a Parteienstaat (party state). Change required a reformation of the constitution. But only the political parties had the power to do this; and they were the very groups that profited from the status quo. Many opponents of the system believed that the only solution to this impasse was a dictatorship. . The Rise of the Austrian Nazi Party
The Austrian Nazi Party eventually became the most dangerous opponent of Austrian democracy. Like anti-Semitism, its roots and political values were well established before the First World War. After the turn of the century, the dissolution of Georg von Schönerer’s Pan-German Party paved the way for the founding of a new German nationalist party in –. The German Workers’ Party was in large measure a product of a fierce political and economic rivalry between Czechs and German-speaking people in northern Bohemia, which was still part of the Habsburg Monarchy. The German workers, displaced by relatively unskilled and lower-paid Czechs, quickly developed a burning hatred of their rivals. By , the party had expanded into the provinces of Upper Austria, Salzburg, and the German-speaking part of the South Tyrol, all areas that included strong ethnic clashes. In April the party’s name was extended, for propaganda purposes, to German National Socialist Workers’ Party, a slightly di ff erent arrangement of words from that of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party of Germany, which was founded in January . Striking similarities between the pre-war Austrian Nazis and the post war German Nazis may be more than simply coincidental. Both were anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-Marxist, and anti-Semitic. Even the terminology and the militancy of the two parties were much the same. As Hitler confessed in a speech in Salzburg in August , “I am ashamed to say that not until today, after so many years, the same movement which began in German-Austria in has just begun to gain a footing in Germany.” Quoted in Georg Franz-Willing, Die Hitlerbewegung; Der Ursprung, – (Hamburg: R. von Decker’s Verlag), p. . Emphasis by Franz-Willing.
The disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy, a disaster for the German-Austrians in general, was particularly devastating for the Austrian Nazis. Roughly three-quarters of their membership was cut o ff in the new Republic of Czechoslovakia. Consequently, the whole decade of the ls saw the Austrian Nazis struggling to build a sizeable membership. Yet until or , they were far larger on a per capita basis than their brother party in Germany, with which they were a ffiliated until through a National Socialist Bureau of the German Language Territory with its headquarters in Vienna. In the first postwar Austrian elections of February , the Nazis won just . percent of the vote. Aided by runaway in flation and a sharp increase in anti-Semitism, however, the Nazis managed to triple their membership to , between August and August of the following year. Philosophical diff erences between the younger and more radical members and the older, mostly trade unionist members who favored a democratically-organized party came to a head in May , when several local groups in Vienna, consisting of younger members, were expelled after refusing to recognize the leadership of the democratically-elected Karl Schulz. Two hundred of the dissidents responded to the expulsion by founding the NSDAP (Hitlerverein ) on May and subordinated themselves directly to Hitler. Eff orts by Schulz to head off a confrontation and to work out a modus vivendi with Hitler gained him nothing but insults when the two men met in Munich in , and again in Passau (on the German side of the Austro-German border) in August . At the Passau meeting, Hitler demanded “unconditional loyalty” from the “Schulz Party.” Austria, he said contemptuously, was nothing more than a German Gau (district) to which he would send a Reichskommissar (deputy) and later name a leader. This was an ominous preview of what was in store for Austria as a whole in . Although there were two attempts to reunite the Austrian Nazis, they remained divided until the dissolution of the Schulz faction in . In the interval they fought like mortal enemies until September , when the Hitler Movement gained the upper hand after Hitler’s startling electoral success in Germany. The Nazi vote then increased from , to . million. Until that time, although both sides claimed to be by far the larger group, they were about equally weak; the Hitlerians, for example, were able to win only , votes in the parliamentary elections of April and gained no parliamentary mandates. After the split among the Austrian Nazis, Hitler provided his followers with ideological guidance. He, however, was prohibited from entering Austrian territory and was too preoccupied with German a ff airs to
furnish the Austrian Nazis with practical day-to-day leadership. The return of a modest degree of prosperity between and mid- dampened anti-Semitic passions and proved detrimental to both Nazi factions. Therefore, the late s were a time of frustration and stagnation for both wings of the Austrian Nazi Party. . The Austrian Heimwehr
Although the Nazis eventually became the most important Austrian fascists, they were by no means the only ones. The second most important group was the Austrian Heimwehr or Home Guard. The Heimwehr was much younger than the Austrian NSDAP. A purely postwar phenomenon, like the Austrian Nazis and many other fascist movements, it originated in an area with extreme ethnic conflicts. The Heimwehr’s early strength occurred in Carinthia and Styria, where in it fought Yugoslav territorial ambitions. Almost from the beginning, however, and increasingly as the external danger waned, the Heimwehr and other right wing paramilitary formations in Austria concentrated their energies against the internal “Marxist threat.” The modest size of the Republic’s army, which remained well below the ,-man maximum imposed by the Treaty of St. Germain and by the Socialist war minister, Julius Deutsch, prompted many veterans to continue their military pursuits outside the regular army in the Heimwehr . They were joined by peasants, lower-middle-class shopkeepers, teachers, and other professional people in rural areas, along with aristocrats, who were still angry over being declassed by the Republic. In October , socialist participation in the Austrian government ended, and in , subsequent to the reestablishment of the currency and several years of hyper-in flation, the Austrian economy began to improve. A degree of stability returned to Austrian politics. No longer proposing major unifying issues or off ering an eff ective leader, in early , the Heimwehr divided into a clerical faction that drew its greatest strength from the more rural states of Upper Austria and the Tyrol; and a radical pan-German wing, concentrated in Styria, Vienna, and Lower Austria. After barely surviving the peaceful middle years of the s the two wings of the Austrian Heimwehr were revived by two events that alarmed the Austrian middle class. In , the Social Democrats created their official “Linz Program,” which reaffirmed the possibility (under highly unlikely circumstances) of a “proletarian dictatorship” to defend democracy. Alarm changed to panic the next year following a July uprising in Vienna, where workers rioted and set fire to the Palace of Justice after
the acquittal of a group of Front Fighters (another right-wing veterans’ organization concentrated in Vienna) accused of murder. The nation wide general strike, called by the Social Democrats in the aftermath of the riot, was quickly squelched by several provincial Heimwehr units, above all by the one in Styria. The Heimwehr could now claim to have saved Austria from “Bolshevism,” especially because the Nazi Party was too divided to exploit the situation. The grateful bourgeoisie soon rushed to join the Heimwehr’s ranks. The Heimwehr’s unity was restored in October when Richard Steidle and another lawyer, the Styrian Dr. Walter Pfrimer, began serving as its co-leaders. The movement grew rapidly during the next two years and contributed to the Nazis’ lackluster growth rate. The swift progress of the Heimwehr served to mask serious internal problems. Neither Steidle nor Pfrimer was eff ective as a leader. Steidle, the leader of the more moderate, clerical wing of the Heimwehr and a talented speaker, was popular with his own Tyrolean followers. But he had a reputation for extreme laziness and indi ff erence. Pfrimer, who led the radical, pan-German wing was overweight, balding, nearly deaf, and a poor public speaker. In , the Heimwehr began receiving financial assistance from Mussolini in exchange for pledges to overthrow the Austrian government and to establish a right-wing, pro-Italian dictatorship, which would renounce any claim to the South Tyrol, annexed by Italy in . This alliance with Mussolini was just one of the issues which divided the Austrian Heimwehr . In the spectrum between the demagogic, religious, but usually non-racial anti-Semitic values of the Christian Social Party, to which the majority of the Heimwehr belonged, and the racial, sometimes violent, anti-Semitism of the Nazis, the Heimwehr stood squarely in the middle, with one foot in each camp. Steidle’s followers tended to prefer the more traditional, Catholic form of anti-Semitism that eschewed racial anti-Semitism. Steidle himself claimed that the movement was not anti-Semitic, but that it merely opposed Jewish Marxists and destructive Eastern Jews. Patriotic Jews were welcome comrades against Marxism. The Pfrimer wing, however, was much less equivocal about anti-Semitism. On numerous occasions, Pfrimer said that Jews ought to be treated as a foreign race, and he complained about Steidle’s more moderate views on the Jewish question. As the fear of Marxism again began to dissipate in the late s, the Heimwehr movement seemed to require a more “positive” program than mere anti-Marxism and anti-Semitism to maintain its raison d’être . Although Heimwehr leaders began formulating speci fically fascist
objectives as early as , it was not until May that they made an almost official avowal of typically fascist principles in the notorious “Korneuburg Oath.” Announced by Richard Steidle, the Oath denounced “Western” democracy, liberal capitalism, and political parties. It demanded the establishment of economic corporations (similar to those in Italy), a “new German national outlook,” and the creation of a Heimwehr dictatorship. Although there was no overt mention of Jews, references to serving the German Volk had anti-Semitic overtones. Nevertheless, the Oath also included an apparent compromise with the Heimwehr’s pan-German wing which would have preferred endorsement of an Anschluss . The Oath marked both the peak of the Heimwehr’s power and its drift toward fascism on the one hand, and the beginning of its decline on the other. It was far too radical for the more clerical members of the movement and yet not radical enough to please the pan-German faction. The Oath, along with the controversial election of the playboy prince, Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg as federal leader in September , and Starhemberg’s decision to enter the parliamentary elections of November , reopened the old schism between the clerical and panGerman wings. The elections were disastrous, because the Heimwehr captured only , votes and eight deputies, thus falling far short of its members’ unrealistic expectations. Walter Pfrimer, who briefly replaced the discredited Starhemberg as federal leader in May , saw a “March on Vienna” (in the style of Mussolini’s March on Rome in ) as the only way to revive the Heimwehr’s flagging fortunes and to gain dictatorial power. The Pfrimer Putsch in September turned out to be a fiasco (in many respects, resembling Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of ), because the other provincial Heimwehr leaders refused to join the escapade. Failing to achieve power through the ballot box or violence, and unable to unite behind a charismatic leader, many frustrated members of the Heimwehr now became receptive to the call of Nazism. . The Austrian Nazi Party at Its Zenith, –
The spring of proved to be one of the major turning points in Nazi-Heimwehr relations and during the whole history of the First Austrian Republic. At a time when there were about , unemployed workers in Austria, or well over a third of all workers, the Nazis made impressive gains in local elections, held in three federal states and several municipalities in April, by amassing , votes or over
percent of those cast. In Vienna alone, their vote jumped from , in to ,, a year and a half later.
The Nazis’ success combined with the recent electoral failure of the Heimwehr made the Austrian Nazi Party irresistible in the eyes of the pan-German wing of the Heimwehr , with its center in Styria. For these people, the Heimwehr’s position on anti-Semitism and the Anschluss was simply too wishy-washy. Whereas the anti-Semitism of most Heimwehr members resembled the relatively easygoing anti-Judaism of Karl Lueger, no such “compromises” could be found within the Nazi ideology. On the Anschluss as well, the Heimwehr’s clerical wing was at best lukewarm, whereas the pan-German wing adamantly advocated a union with Germany. Moreover, in January , when the anti-clerical and antiSocialist Nazis came to power in Germany, the Christian Socials and Social Democrats dropped the Anschluss from their party programs, thus leaving the Nazis as the only major Austrian party still unequivocally favoring the union. Anyone regarding the merger of the two Germanspeaking countries as Austria’s most important objective had little choice but to join the Nazis. The Styrian section of the Heimwehr allied itself to the Nazis in the spring of , a move which, during the remainder of and , was soon followed by similar actions by other panGerman and anti-Semitic groups. . Fascism and the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg Regime
When Hitler came to power in Germany, the Austrian Nazis were supremely confident that it was only a question of time, perhaps just a few months, until they too were in power. They met unexpected resistance, however, in the person of the Chancellor Dollfuss, who had been appointed in May . As a practicing Catholic and a patriotic Austrian, he had no desire to see his country swallowed up by the anti-Catholic Nazi regime in Germany. Following a series of Nazi attacks against Jews and government property, he outlawed the party on June . In early October , he also suppressed anti-Semitic violence at the University of Vienna, albeit after having been subjected to pressure by the American minister to Austria. Despite Dollfuss’s resolute opposition to both Nazism and antiSemitism, there were some de finite fascist-like characteristics of the Dollfuss government and that of his successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg. Dollfuss and Schuschnigg emphasized what Dollfuss called the “good and healthy” values in National Socialism, by incorporating some aspects of National Socialism and Italian Fascism, in order to “take the wind
out of the Nazis’ sails.” In March , Dollfuss allowed the Austrian Parliament to “dissolve itself,” after a ridiculous dispute involving voting procedures. The Social Democratic Party was outlawed after an uprising by Socialist extremists in Linz. On April , the Austrian chancellor, aping Hitler’s pseudo-legality, insured that a new authoritarian constitution was confirmed by the Christian Social and Heimwehr members of the old Parliament. This constitution, never fully implemented, provided for a highly centralized state possessing few powers, either for the state parliaments, or for a new federal assembly that represented seven fascist-style economic corporations. The assembly could not initiate or even debate legislation. Under the new regime, only a single party was tolerated, the Fatherland Front, which, with its huge rallies and mass display of flags, resembled fascist parties in other countries. The Fatherland Front, however, never became genuinely popular in Austria, even though it included a nominal membership of over two million. Obviously it was created from the top down, rather than from the bottom up, as was the case with the German Nazi and the Italian Fascist Parties. Dollfuss and his successor did go so far as to suppress democratic elections, as well as freedom of the press and speech. They established detention areas for their political enemies, although these camps were a far cry from the concentration camps in Germany. The diff erences between the values of the “authoritarian” regimes of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg and those of Hitler and Mussolini were probably more signi ficant than the similarities. Neither man persecuted Jews or Catholics, although they tolerated anti-Semitic articles in newspapers. They almost certainly did not intend to establish a permanent dictatorship. They saw their governments, instead, as a kind of necessary evil, until the twin challenges of Marxism and National Socialism could be contained. There was no talk about making the new system last for a “thousand years.” Neither Dollfuss nor Schuschnigg, moreover, fit the mold of a typical fascist or totalitarian dictator. Both men were sincere, practicing Catholics. They did not reveal the slightest interest in military glory (even if Austria had possessed the capacity); nor is there any evidence that they lusted for sheer power. They wanted a government strong enough to subdue Nazi radicals (and Socialists), but mild enough to appeal to the more moderate Nazis, as well as to Jews. They succeeded in retaining the loyalty of the latter, but not the former. Their dictatorship can be described, at most, as only semi-fascist.
. The Triumph of Austrian-Fascism
The Austrian Nazis, frustrated by their prohibition by Dollfuss, attempted to come to power through a Putsch in July , only to fail again when Mussolini and the Western democracies, outraged by the murder of Dollfuss, finally showed signs of resistance. Another chance did not appear before March , when Hitler felt that German rearmament had proceeded to the point where he could take stronger action against Austria without fear of foreign intervention. In February, Hitler met Chancellor Schuschnigg at Berchtesgaden and browbeat him into appointing two pro-Nazis to his cabinet, including Arthur Seyss-Inquart, as Minister of the Interior in charge of police. Encouraged by Schuschnigg’s weakening position, the Nazis of Styria, many of whom were former members of the Styrian Heimwehr , revolted and made Styria a virtual Nazi province. These developments forced Schuschnigg to make a desperate attempt to save his country’s independence through an illfated plebiscite. Sensing an embarrassing outcome, Hitler unleashed the Wehrmacht , and the rest, as they say, is history. After the Anschluss , the Austrian Nazis were no longer restrained by the Austrian government. They created an anti-Jewish rampage far worse than anything yet seen in Germany proper. Jewish stores were looted. Jews were robbed on the streets of Vienna, and their apartments were invaded and plundered. In short, Jews were humiliated in every conceivable way by their Nazi tormentors. Within a few hours or at most a few days, all Jewish actors, musicians, and journalists had lost their jobs. By mid-June , just three months after the Anschluss , Jews had already been more thoroughly purged from public life in Austria than in the five years following Hitler’s takeover of power in Germany. Why was this Austrian outburst of anti-Semitism so much more extreme than anything yet seen in Germany proper? The most likely answer lies in Austria’s location as a Grenzland or borderland. Most of its provinces were located next to states with non-German nationalities, which heightened the Austrians’ sense of their own ethnicity. (The same anti-ethnicity can now be seen with horrifying consequences, in the former Yugoslavia.) Many Austrian Nazis themselves, like the extermination camp commandant, Odilo Globocnigg, and six of the seven Austrian Gauleiters , possessed non-German names or non-Aryan features, which made them all the more eager to prove to their Reich German superiors that their German nationalism was second to none in its fanaticism.
. Fascist Values in Post-World War II Austria
The end of the Second World War saw the practical end of Austrian fascism. Already in , the Austrian Heimwehr had been legally, if not practically, prohibited by Chancellor Schuschnigg, and at the end of the war the Allies outlawed the Nazi Party. Nevertheless, a few remnants of fascism and its values have survived up to the present day in the Second Austrian Republic. Many of the , former Austrian Nazis were eventually absorbed by the two major postwar parties, the Austrian People’s Party—in many respects the successor to the Christian Social Party, except much less clerical and right-wing—and the Social Democrats. In , other ex-Nazis, disgruntled at their temporary exclusion from the franchise, founded their own party, the League of Independents ( Verband der Unabhängigen or VDU). For most of its members, National Socialism was a dead issue, with one exception: the party’s avowal of the unity of the German Volk . In , however, when the VDU further declared that Austria was “a German state. . . its policy must never be directed against another German state and must serve the entire German Volk ,” it suff ered a crushing defeat in the next elections. In more recent years the Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs ), the successor to the VDU, led by the charismatic former governor of Carinthia, Jörg Haider, has also displayed a few fascist values, especially an espousal of German nationalism. However, a plebiscite he promoted in , which was aimed at stopping immigration, won only a disappointing , votes, a little more than half the , he had predicted. Although Haider’s nationalism is directed at foreigners in general, anti-Semites have gravitated to his party. No fewer than . percent of its members, who were polled in , expressed hard-core anti-Semitic views, as compared to only percent of the People’s Party and . percent of the Social Democrats. In general, all the postwar polls have also revealed that anti-Semitism is substantially stronger in Austria than in Germany, France, or the United States. About percent of all Austrians, according to a poll conducted in , articulated at least some anti-Semitic views; about to percent had fairly strong prejudices against Jews; and about to percent could be described as hard-core anti-Semites. Nevertheless, one especially encouraging sign is that anti-Semitism is weakest Max E. Riedlsperger, The Lingering Shadow of Hitler: The Austrian Independent Party Movement since (New York: Columbia University Press, ), pp. , .
among the youngest generation and intellectuals. The Waldheim a ff air in , although it brought latent anti-Jewish prejudices into the open, did not substantially change these figures. It was followed by a massive protest against anti-Semitism. It is extremely improbable that Austria will ever experience again the passionate, violent, and nearly universal anti-Semitism that existed between and ; likewise, it is unlikely that anything approaching the fanatical fascism of the inter-war years is likely to reappear in the future. Almost none of the conditions that made anti-Semitism so virulent in the First Republic still exists today. Secularism has largely eliminated religious and cultural anti-Semitic values, and the decimation of the Jewish population has removed the causes of economic antiSemitism. Racial anti-Semitism has been discredited by its close association with Nazi atrocities. What remains in Austria are old stereotypes, especially those concerning alleged Jewish financial power and control over the mass media. Nevertheless, there is reason to hope that with education, these views will gradually disappear, although the process is likely to be a lengthy one. If the roots of anti-Semitism—one of the most powerful antivalues in fascism—have been greatly weakened in postwar Austria, the same can not be said of one of the major aims of the Austrian fascists: a union with Germany. The Anschluss had been fostered after by the nearly universally held belief, even by people like the Christian Socialists who were anything but pro-German, that Austria was simply not viable as an independent state. To some extent this conviction became a selffulfilling prophecy. Today, Austria is one of the most prosperous countries in the world, and even the Anschluss of East and West Germany in did not find an echo in the Alpine state. Finally, most of the passion and ideological dogmatism that divided Austria into three bitterly opposed camps—Catholics, Socialists, and pan-German nationalists—is missing in the Second Republic. The People’s Party has given up its close ties to the Catholic church, and the Church has renounced an active role in politics. The Social Democrats have given up their radical Marxism in favor of a left-of-center welfarism. Only in the Freedom Party can one find significant remnants of both pan-German nationalism and anti-Semitism, but even there they are held only by a minority of its members.
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