The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  Even Hitler did not become the dictator of Germany at once. At first he believed that the best device to give himself more independence from his coalition partners was one more election, hoping for the outright majority that had so far eluded him. Before the election could be held, however, a lucky break put into Hitler’s hands an excuse to carry out a virtual coup d’état from within, without a breath of opposition from right or center. That lucky break was the fire that gutted the Reichstag building in Berlin on February 28, 1933.

  It was long believed that the Nazis themselves set the fire and then framed a dim-witted Dutch communist youth found on the premises, Marinus van der Lubbe, in order to persuade the public to accept extreme anticommunist measures. Today most historians believe that van der Lubbe really lit the fire, and that Hitler and his associates, taken by surprise, really believed a communist coup had begun.38 Enough Germans shared their panic to give the Nazis almost unlimited leeway.

  What happened next has usually been presented as Hitler’s story, as the new chancellor moved with remarkable speed and self-assurance to capitalize on the widespread fear of communist “terrorism." What needs equal emphasis is the readiness of German conservatives to give him a free hand, and of the organizations of civil society to meet him halfway. While the ruins of the Reichstag were still smoldering, President Hindenburg signed a “Decree for the Protection of People and State" on February 28, using his emergency powers under Article 48. The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended all legal protection of speech, assembly, property, and personal liberty, permitted the authorities to arrest suspected “terrorists" (i.e., communists) at will, and gave the federal government authority over the state governments’ police power.

  After that, few Germans were prepared to resist, in the absence of any help from the police, the judiciary, or other authorities, when Brownshirts erupted into courtrooms expelling Jewish lawyers and magistrates39 or sacked left-wing offices and newspapers.

  President Hindenburg had already authorized new elections. When they took place on March 5, however, despite Nazi terror directed against parties and voters of the Left, Hitler’s party still fell short of the coveted majority. One more step would be necessary before Hitler could do his will. The Nazis proposed an Enabling Act that would empower Hitler to govern by decree for four years, without having to refer to either parliament or president, after which he promised to retire. Its official title was a splendid example of Nazi bombast, or LTI:40 “Law to Relieve the Distress of the People and Reich." The constitution required a two-thirds vote of the parliament for such a delegation of legislative powers to the executive.

  Even though a majority of Germans had still voted for other parties on March 5, Hitler assembled his two-thirds majority for the Enabling Act on March 24, 1933, aided by the arrest of communist deputies. The most decisive non-Nazi votes came from the Catholic Zentrum, together with Hugenberg’s nationalists. The Vatican agreed, reflecting Pope Pius XI’s conviction that communism was worse than Nazism, and his indifference to political liberties (he thought Catholics should work in the world through schools and “Catholic Action"—grassroots youth and worker organizations—rather than through elections and political parties). Hitler paid off his debt on July 20 by signing a Concordat with the Vatican promising toleration for Catholic teaching and Catholic Action in Germany as long as these organizations kept out of politics.

  Hitler was now free to dissolve all other parties (including the Catholic Zentrum) in the following weeks and establish a one-party dictatorship. His conservative accomplices were willing to turn a blind eye to the “revolution from below" carried out unofficially in spring 1933 by Nazi Party activists against Jews and Marxists, and even the establishment of the first concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich, in March 1933, for political enemies, as long as such illegalities were committed against “enemies of the people." Hitler was able to extend the Enabling Act by his own authority for another five years when it expired in 1937, almost without notice, and again indefinitely, justified by war, in 1942. He seemed to want to cover his dictatorship with the legal veneer the Enabling Act gave to the regime’s arbitrary actions.

  Gaining power helped a fascist leader dominate his party, but even after January 1933, Hitler’s conflicts with his party were not over. Some party zealots believed that Hitler’s success in establishing a Nazi dictatorship meant that they would soon have unlimited access to jobs and spoils in a “second revolution." SA leader Ernst Röhm pressured Hitler to transform the Brownshirts into a supplementary armed force, a project that alarmed the regular army. Hitler settled things once and for all on the “Night of the Long Knives," June 30, 1934, by having Röhm and other SA leaders murdered, as is well known, and also, as is less well known, recalcitrant conservatives (including several members of Vice-Chancellor von Papen’s staff) and other notables who had given offense such as Gregor Strasser, General von Schleicher (along with his wife), Gustav von Kahr, the conservative Bavarian leader who had blocked Hitler’s way in 1923, and thirteen Reichstag deputies. The victims totaled between 150 and 200.41 That eye-popping lesson, along with the spoils of Nazi victories, kept doubters in line thereafter.

  Mussolini’s revolution after power was more gradual, and the struggle for predominance among three contenders—the leader, the party zealots, and the conservative establishment—was much less definitively settled than in Nazi Germany. For nearly two years Mussolini appeared reconciled to governing as an ordinary parliamentary prime minister, in coalition with nationalists, liberals, and a few Populari. His government pursued conventionally conservative policies in most areas, such as Finance Minister Alberto De Stefani’s orthodox deflation and budget balancing. 42

  The menace of squadristi violence never stopped threatening to burst out of Mussolini’s control, however. Many of the Blackshirts wanted a “second revolution"43 to allocate all the jobs and all the spoils to them alone. Their anticlimactic march within Rome on October 31, 1922, spiraled into violence that caused seven deaths, seventeen injuries, and substantial damage to several opposition newspapers before the Duce managed to bundle them out of town the same night.44 Thereafter, whenever they felt that Mussolini was “normalizing" too much, the frustrated squadristi were ready to send him a message, as in Turin on December 18–21, 1923 (at least eleven dead), and in Florence in January 1925 (several dead, including a socialist deputy and an opposition attorney).

  While Mussolini sometimes tried to restrain his unruly followers, he occasionally found their pressure useful. The Acerbo election law was passed by the lower house on July 23, 1923, while Blackshirts patrolled the streets outside and Mussolini threatened “to let the revolution run its course" if the law were rejected.45 When the senate approved it on November 18, 1923, this bizarre measure accorded two thirds of the seats to the largest party, as long as it received more than 25 percent of the votes, the other third of the seats being distributed proportionally among the other parties. In the ensuing election of April 6, 1924, with Fascist pressure on the electorate, the “National" list (Fascist plus Nationalist Parties) received 64.9 percent of the vote and thus took 374 seats. Even so, it failed to get a majority in the regions of Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, and Venetia. Thereafter, Mussolini had a docile parliament and the appearance of legitimacy, but his regime could hardly be considered “normal."

  This quasinormal period was brought to an end by a shocking incident of renewed squadrismo, the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the eloquent secretary of the reformist wing of the Italian Socialist Party. On May 30, 1924, Matteotti gave the chamber detailed evidence of Fascist corruption and illegality in the recent parliamentary elections. Ten days after this speech, the socialist leader was seized on a Rome street and bundled into a waiting car. His body was found several weeks later. When eyewitnesses made it possible to trace the car, it became clear that close personal associates of Mussolini had committed the murder. It remains uncertain whether Mussolini personally ordered the act, or whether his subordinates
did it on their own. In any event, Mussolini’s ultimate responsibility was clear. The murder shocked most Italians, and important conservatives who had supported Mussolini now called for a new untainted government.46

  The outcry over Matteotti’s murder offered the king and the conservative establishment their best opportunity to remove Mussolini from office. Once again, several paths were open to them. They chose not to press their doubts over Mussolini to the point of active steps to remove him, however, fearful that this would open the way to renewed chaos or to a government of the Left.

  After several months of stalemate, while Mussolini’s conservative allies dithered and the opposition withdrew into a self-defeating boycott of parliamentary activity,47 the ras forced Mussolini’s hand. On December 31, 1924, disillusioned with their leader’s apparent lack of resolve, thirty-three consuls of the Fascist Militia (into which Mussolini had converted the squadristi in an effort at control) confronted him in his office with an ultimatum: in effect, if the Duce did not crush the opposition, they would act without him.

  Aware of his opponents’ hesitations and fearful of a revolt of the ras, Mussolini took the plunge. In an aggressive speech on January 3, 1925, he accepted “full political, moral and historical responsibility for all that has happened" and promised vigorous action. Mobilized Militia units had already begun closing down opposition papers and organizations and arresting members of the opposition. Over the following two years, spurred on by several attempts on Mussolini’s life, the Fascist-dominated parliament passed a series of Laws for the Defense of the State that strengthened the power of the administration, replaced elected mayors with appointed officials (podestà), subjected the press and radio to censorship, reinstituted the death penalty, gave Fascist unions a monopoly of labor representation, and dissolved all parties except the PNF. By early 1927 Italy had become a one-party dictatorship. Conservatives generally accepted Mussolini’s coup from within because the alternatives seemed either continued deadlock or admitting the Left into government.

  Comparisons and Alternatives

  At this third stage, comparison acquires much greater bite than at the second. Numerous first-stage fascist movements, finding little space in which to grow, remained too weak to be interesting to allies and accomplices. A few became rooted but failed to establish the influence and elite friends necessary for plausible contention for office. Only a handful of them actually reached power. Among those that have, some became associated as junior partners within authoritarian regimes that eventually muzzled or destroyed them. Only in Germany and Italy have fascists so far fully grasped the reins.

  Junior partnerships within authoritarian regimes proved disastrous for fascist movements. Playing second fiddle fit badly with fascists’ extravagant claims to transform their peoples and redirect history. For their part, the authoritarian senior partners took a dim view of the fascists’ impatient violence and disdain for established interests, for these cases often involved fascist movements that retained much of the social radicalism of the early movement stage.

  We have already noted the bloodiest suppression of a fascist junior partner by an authoritarian dictator, the liquidation of the Legion of the Archangel Michael by the Romanian dictator Marshal Antonescu in January 1941.48 As we will see in chapter 6, the Iberian dictators Franco and Salazar reduced fascist parties to powerlessness, though less bloodily. The Brazilian dictator Vargas tolerated a fascist movement and then crushed it.49 In general, well-entrenched conservative regimes of all sorts have provided unfavorable terrain for fascism to reach power. Either they have repressed what they regarded as fomenters of disorder, or they have preempted fascism’s issues and following for themselves.50 If conservatives could rule alone, they did.

  Another fascist route into power was to follow in the baggage train of a victorious fascist army. But this happened far less often than one might expect. Mussolini’s hapless soldiers afforded him few opportunities to impose puppets elsewhere. Hitler enjoyed many such chances, but he usually put little faith in foreign fascists. Nazism, as a recipe for national unity and dynamism, was the last thing he wanted for a country he had conquered and occupied. It was the German Volk’s private pact with history, and Hitler had no intention of exporting it.51 Hitler was also, for much of the time, and contrary to popular legend, a pragmatic ruler with a keen practical sense. The local fascist parties would be far less useful to him for keeping conquered peoples in line than local traditional conservative elites.

  Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian fascist leader whose name furnished the very word for a puppet government, actually had little authority in occupied Norway. Although Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling (NS) had barely surpassed 2 percent of the popular vote in the 1930s, he seized the opportunity of the German invasion of April 9, 1940, and the withdrawal of the king and parliament from Oslo to declare his party in power. Although the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg supported him, more responsible German officials knew he aroused only loathing in Norway, and after only six days Hitler agreed to set him aside.

  The Nazi official Joseph Terboven governed Norway as Reichskommissar, assisted after September 1940 by a state council in which the NS held ten of the thirteen seats, excluding Quisling himself. Terboven allowed Quisling to continue to build the NS (the only authorized party), and, on February 1, 1942, gave him the title “minister-president." Even then, however, Quisling enjoyed no independent authority, and Hitler rebuffed his repeatedly expressed wish for a more independent role for Norway in Nazi Europe. Quisling’s phantom rule was met by increasing passive and active resistance.

  Occupied Holland, whose Queen Wilhelmina had set up a government-in-exile in London, was governed by a civilian administration headed by the Austrian Nazi lawyer Arthur Seyss-Inquart, with the Dutch fascist leader Anton Mussert playing a very minor role. The Danish fascist movement had been almost invisible before the war. Its leader Fritz Clausen played no role after 1940. King Christian X remained in place as a symbol of national continuity while his minister Scavenius supplied the agricultural products Germany wanted and even signed the Anti-Comintern Pact.

  France was the German army’s most valuable conquest, and since French neutrality, products, and manpower were indispensable assets for the Reich war machine, Hitler was not about to endanger them by giving power in France to one of the petty squabbling fascist chieflings whom we met in the previous chapter. It was the Führer’s good fortune that the defeat of May–June 1940 so discredited the Third French Republic that the French National Assembly voted full powers on July 10, 1940, to an eighty-four-year-old World War I hero, Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had stepped forward in June as the main proponent of stopping the fight. Pétain set up a provisional capital at Vichy, in the unoccupied south, and governed through authoritarian personal rule supported by the traditional French state services, the economic and social establishment, the military, and the Roman Catholic Church. He worked hard to cooperate with the Nazi occupation authorities of the northern half of France in hopes of finding a suitable place in the new German-dominated Europe, which he was convinced was permanent.

  Hitler kept a number of French fascists available on the Nazi payroll in Paris, in case he needed to pressure Pétain with a rival. But only in the last days of the war, when the tide had turned and the conservative notables who had supported Vichy at the outset began to abandon it, did some pre-war fascists, such as Marcel Déat, find places in the Vichy government.52

  The main role Hitler gave homegrown fascists in occupied countries was to recruit local volunteers to freeze and die on the Russian front. Both the Belgian Léon Degrelle53 and the French fascist Jacques Doriot54 rendered Hitler this service.

  Hitler was equally uninterested in promoting fascist movements within satellite states. He maintained warm personal relations with Marshal Antonescu, who had crushed Romanian fascism;55 Antonescu’s thirty Romanian divisions on the Russian front helped him far more than the wild-eyed Legionaries of Horia Sima. He left Slovakia, which
first came into being as an independent state when he broke up Czechoslovakia in May 1939, to Father Josef Tiso’s Slovak Popular Party, even though it was more clerical authoritarian than fascist. It had received up to a third of the Slovak vote between the wars under Father Andreas Hlinka, and it was later willing to assist with the deportation of Jews.

  Hitler also found it cheapest and simplest to leave Hungary unoccupied and under the rule of Admiral Horthy, who had governed the country along mostly traditional authoritarian lines since March 1, 1920. The German army entered Hungary only on March 22, 1944, when the Nazis suspected that Horthy was negotiating with the approaching Allied armies. Only in this final extremity, as Soviet troops entered Hungary, on October 16, 1944, did Hitler replace Horthy with the leader of the Hungarian Arrow-Cross movement, Ferenc Szálasi. Fascist Hungary was short-lived, for it was very soon overrun by the advancing Soviet armies.

  The Nazis did allow native fascists to take power in the client state of Croatia, for this was a new creation without ruling elites already in place, and, indeed, it was in the Italian zone of influence. In May 1941, when the German army overran and split up Yugoslavia, the pre-war terrorist-nationalist Ustaša and its longtime leader Ante Paveli were permitted to take power in the newly independent state of Croatia. Even Nazi onlookers were appalled by the disorderly slaughters in which the Ustaša massacred a soberly estimated 500,000 Serbs, 200,000 Croats, 90,000 Bosnian Muslims, 60,000 Jews, 50,000 Montenegrins, and 30,000 Slovenes. 56 None of these puppets in satellite or occupied states could survive one moment after the defeat of their Axis protectors. In Spain and Portugal, by contrast, authoritarian regimes continued to function after 1945, carefully avoiding any hint of fascist trimmings.