The Anatomy of Fascism
Page 17
Over time the Nazi prerogative state steadily encroached upon the normative state and contaminated its work,14 so that even within it the perception of national emergency allowed the regime to override individual rights and due process.15 After the war began, the Nazi prerogative state achieved something approaching total dominance. Normative institutions atrophied at home and functioned hardly at all in the occupied territories of former Poland and the Soviet Union, as we shall see more fully in the next chapter.
Fascist Italy can also be fruitfully interpreted as a dual state, as we already know. Mussolini, however, accorded far more power to the normative state than Hitler did.16 Fascist propaganda put the state, not the party, at the center of its message. We are not quite sure why Mussolini subordinated his party to the state, but there are several possible explanations. He had less leeway, less drive, and less luck than Hitler. President Hindenburg died in August 1934, leaving Hitler alone at the helm. Mussolini was burdened with King Victor Emmanuel III to the end, and it was the king who eventually deposed him in July 1943. Mussolini may also have feared the rivalry of his freewheeling party chieftains.
Even so, the Italian Fascist state contained important prerogative elements: its secret police (the OVRA);17 its controlled press; its economic baronies (the IRI,18 for example); and its African fiefdoms, where party chiefs like Italo Balbo could strut and command the life and death of indigenous peoples. And in the late 1930s, involvement in war strengthened the Italian prerogative state.19
The struggle for dominance within fascist dictatorships involves more than party and state, however, or prerogative and normative states. Fraenkel’s dual state image is incomplete. Elements outside the state also participate in the tug-of-war for power within fascist regimes. The German and Italian fascist regimes replaced with their own organizations traditionally independent power centers such as labor unions, youth clubs, and associations of professions and producers. The Nazis even attempted to impose a “German Christian" bishop and doctrine on the Protestant churches.20 Fascist regimes could not always succeed in swallowing up civil society, however.
Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the founding scholars of the “totalitarian" model, coined the term “islands of separateness" to describe elements of civil society that survive within a totalitarian dictatorship.21 Such islands of separateness as Catholic parishes—however little inclined they might be to oppose the regime fundamentally, beyond objecting to specific actions22—could possess sufficient organizational resiliency and emotional loyalty to withstand party infiltration.23 One does not have to accept the totalitarian model integrally to find the islands of separateness metaphor useful.
Hitler and the Nazi Party gradually overcame most of the islands of separateness within the German state and society in a process called euphemistically by party propagandists Gleichschaltung: coordination, or leveling. A common oversimplification makes this process seem both inevitable and unilinear. Well-rooted economic and social associations could not be swept away so casually, however, even in Nazi Germany. Gleichschaltung could involve two-way negotiation as well as force. Some groups and organizations were able to subvert Nazi institutions from within or “appropriate" them for their own aims.24 Others quietly but stubbornly defended partial autonomy, even while accepting some of the regime’s aims.
German citizens could turn even the dread Gestapo to their own personal ends by denouncing a rival, a creditor, a parent, or an unsatisfactory spouse to the secret police.25 Fraternities in German universities are a good example of survival. Nazism was so attractive to students that even before 1933 their national organization had been taken over by party activists. One would therefore have expected fraternities to disappear into Gleichschaltung without a murmur after January 1933. Despite the Nazi regime’s efforts to transform the “reactionary" dueling clubs into party Kameradschaften (social and training centers), however, fraternities persisted unofficially, partly because powerful Nazi officials among the “old boy" networks and alumni associations defended them, partly because students grew increasingly apathetic toward party propaganda.26
In the much slower process of consolidating Fascist rule in Italy, only the labor unions, the political parties, and the media were fully “brought into line." The Catholic Church was the most important island of separateness in Fascist Italy, and although the regime encroached briefly in 1931 on the Church’s youth movements and schools, it ultimately lost that battle. 27 The Italian Fascist student clubs, the Gruppi Universitaria Fascista (GUF), were quietly “appropriated" by their members for their own extra-Fascist or even anti-Fascist enjoyment,28 as was the leisure-time organization, the Dopolavoro.29
All these enduring tensions within fascist regimes pitted against each other four elements that together forged these dictatorships out of their quarrelsome collaboration: the fascist leader; his party (whose militants clamored for jobs, perquisites, expansionist adventures, and the fulfillment of some elements of their early radical program); the state apparatus (functionaries such as police and military commanders, magistrates, and local governors); and, finally, civil society (holders of social, economic, political, and cultural power such as professional associations, leaders of big business and big agriculture, churches, and conservative political leaders).30 This four-way tension gave these regimes their characteristic blend of febrile activism and shapelessness.31
Tension was permanent within fascist regimes because none of the contending groups could dispense completely with the others. Conservatives hesitated to get rid of the fascist leader, for fear of letting the Left or the liberals regain power.32 Hitler and Mussolini, for their part, needed the economic and military resources that the conservatives controlled. At the same time, the dictators could not afford to weaken their obstreperous parties too much, lest they undermine their own independent power base. No contender could destroy the others outright, for fear of upsetting the balance of forces that kept the tandem in power and the Left at bay. 33
In their protracted struggles for supremacy within fascist rule, the parallel organizations that fascist parties developed during the period of taking root played complex and ambiguous roles. They were an asset for a fascist leader who wished to outflank the conservative bastions instead of attacking them frontally. At the same time, however, they offered ambitious radical militants an autonomous power base to challenge the leader’s preeminence.
In Italy, the Fascist Party at first duplicated every level of public authority with a party agency: the local party chief flanked the appointed mayor (podestà), the regional party secretary (federale) flanked the prefect, the Fascist militia flanked the army, and so on. As soon as his power was consolidated, however, Mussolini declared that the “revolution is over" and explicitly made the prefect “the highest authority of the state," to whom party leaders were subordinated.34 The Duce had no intention of letting the ras push him around again.
Italian Fascism’s most successful parallel organization did not challenge the state but invaded the realm of leisure-time recreation, an area heretofore left to individual choice, private clubs, or Catholic parishes. In practice, the Fascist Dopolavoro fell far short of its announced aims of building the nation and creating the Fascist “new man" (and woman). It was substantially appropriated from within by ordinary Italians who just wanted to see movies or play sports. It was, nonetheless, the Fascist regime’s most ambitious attempt to penetrate Italian society down to the country towns and compete with the local boss and the priest for social authority there.35
The Nazi Party competed with traditional agencies by a similar array of parallel organizations. The party had its own paramilitary force (the SA), its own party court, party police, and youth movement. The party’s foreign policy branch, first under Alfred Rosenberg but later part of Joachim von Ribbentrop’s personal staff (the Dienststelle Ribbentrop), intervened actively among German-speaking foreign populations in Austria and the Czech Sudetenland.36 After the Nazi Party attained power, the
parallel organizations threatened to usurp the functions of the army, the Foreign Office, and other agencies. In a separate and sinister development, the political police was detached from the Interior Ministries of the German states and centralized, step by step, as the notorious Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), under the command of fanatical Nazi Heinrich Himmler. Duplication of traditional power centers by parallel party organizations was a principal reason for the already noted “shapelessness" and the chaotic lines of authority that characterized fascist rule and set it apart from military dictatorship or authoritarian rule.
In a further complication, fascist regimes allowed opportunists to flood into the parties, which thereby ceased to be the private clubs of “old fighters." The Italian Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) opened its rolls in 1933 in an effort to fascistize the whole population. Thereafter party membership was required for civil-service jobs, including teaching. Mussolini hoped that party membership would fortify the casual Italian civic spirit that so annoyed him,37 but the opposite seems to have happened. As party membership became a good career move, cynics said that the initials PNF stood for “per necessità famigliari.”38 Nazi Party membership ballooned by 1.6 million between January and May 1933. Even though party rolls were then closed to preserve the party’s identity as a select elite, many opportunist officials were given dispensations to join.39
In the endless contest for predominance within fascist regimes, the fascist leader sometimes managed to subject his allies to unwanted policies, as Hitler did to a significant degree. In other cases, conservative forces and bureaucrats might retain substantial independent power, as they did in Fascist Italy—enough to persuade the atheist Mussolini to give the Catholic Church its most favorable treatment since Italian unification, to force him to sacrifice his syndicalist friends to businessmen’s desires for autonomy and privilege,40 and, ultimately, to remove him from power in July 1943 when the approach of Allied armies convinced them that Fascism was no longer serving national ends.41 Even Hitler, however easily he seemed to override many conservative preferences, never freed himself, until war became total in 1942, from the need to placate owners of munitions plants, army officers, professional experts, and religious leaders—and even public opinion.
Nevertheless, fascist leaders enjoyed a kind of supremacy that was not quite like leadership in other kinds of regime. The Führer and the Duce could claim legitimacy neither by election nor conquest. It rested on charisma,42 a mysterious direct communication with the Volk or razza that needs no mediation by priests or party chieftains. Their charisma resembled media-era celebrity “stardom," raised to a higher power by its say over war and death. It rested on a claim to a unique and mystical status as the incarnation of the people’s will and the bearer of the people’s destiny. A whiff of charisma is not unknown among traditional dictators, of course, and even some democratically elected leaders, such as Churchill, de Gaulle, and the two Roosevelts, had it. Stalin surely had charisma, as the public hysteria at his funeral showed. But Stalin shared his role as the bearer of historical destiny with the Communist Party, which made succession possible even if palace intrigues and murders multiplied before the successor could emerge. But fascist rule is more nakedly dependent on charisma than any other kind, which may help explain why no fascist regime has so far managed to pass power to a successor. 43 Both Hitler and Mussolini had charisma, though Mussolini’s declining vitality in middle age and his tawdry end made most people forget the magnetism he had once exerted, even outside Italy.44
Charisma helps us understand several curious features of fascist leadership. The notorious indolence of Hitler,45 far from making Nazism more tepid, freed his subordinates to compete in driving the regime toward ever more extreme radicalization. A charismatic leader is also immune from the surprisingly widespread grumbling against the administration that quickly arose in both Germany and Italy.46 At the same time, charismatic leadership is brittle. It promises to the Volk or the razza, as Adrian Lyttelton once noted, “a privileged relation with history."47 Having raised expectations so high, a fascist leader unable to deliver the promised triumphs risks losing his magic even faster than an elected president or prime minister, of whom less is expected. Mussolini discovered this rule to his sorrow in July 1943.
Studying the fascist exercise of power, therefore, is not simply a matter of laying out the dictator’s will (as the propagandists claimed, and as unreflective “intentionalists" seem to believe). It means examining the never-ending tensions within fascist regimes among the leader, his party, the state, and traditional holders of social, economic, political, or cultural power. This reality has produced an influential interpretation of fascist governance as “polyocracy," or rule by multiple relatively autonomous power centers, in unending rivalry and tension with each other. 48 In polyocracy the famous “leadership principle" cascades down through the social and political pyramid, creating a host of petty Führer s and Duces in a state of Hobbesian war of all against all.
This effort to understand the complex character of fascist dictatorship and its interaction with society, entirely worthy in itself, entails two risks. It makes it hard to account for the demonic energy unleashed by fascism: Why did “polyocracy" not simply tie everyone’s hands in stalemate? Furthermore, in extreme versions, it may make us lose sight of the leader’s supremacy. In an energetic debate in the 1980s, “intentionalists" defended the centrality of the dictator’s will, while “structuralists" or “functionalists" asserted that the dictator’s will could not be applied without multiple links with state and society. Both views were easy to caricature, and were sometimes taken to extremes. Intentionalism worked best for foreign and military policy, where Hitler and Mussolini both played hands-on roles. The most emotionally charged issue within the intentionalist-structuralist debate was the Holocaust, where the enormity of the outcome seemed to demand the presence of a correspondingly enormous criminal will. I will look at this issue more closely in the next chapter.
A major problem for intentionalists was Hitler’s personal style of rule. While Mussolini toiled long hours at his desk, Hitler continued to indulge in the lazy bohemian dilettantism of his art-student days. When aides sought his attention for urgent matters, Hitler was often inaccessible. He spent much time at his Bavarian retreat; even in Berlin he often neglected pressing business. He subjected his dinner guests to midnight monologues, rose at midday, and devoted his afternoons to personal passions such as plans by his young protégé Albert Speer to reconstruct his hometown of Linz and the center of Berlin in a monumental style befitting the Thousand-Year Reich. After February 1938 the cabinet ceased to meet; some cabinet ministers never managed to see the Führer at all. Hans Mommsen went so far as to call him a “weak dictator." Mommsen never meant to deny the unlimited nature of Hitler’s vaguely defined and haphazardly exercised power, but he observed that the Nazi regime was not organized on rational principles of bureaucratic efficiency, and that its astonishing burst of murderous energy was not produced by Hitler’s diligence.49 I will consider further the mystery of fascist radicalization in chapter 6.
Neither an extreme intentionalist view of the all-powerful leader ruling alone nor an extreme structuralist view that initiatives from below are the main motor of fascist dynamism is tenable. In the 1990s, the most convincing work established two-way explanations in which competition among midlevel officials to anticipate the leader’s intimate wishes and “work toward" them are given due place, while the leader’s role in establishing goals and removing limits and rewarding zealous associates plays its indispensable role.50
The Tug-of-War between Fascists and Conservatives
When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, his conservative allies, headed by Deputy Chancellor Franz von Papen, along with those conservative and nationalist leaders who supported von Papen’s Hitler experiment, expected to manage the untrained new head of government without difficulty. They were confident that their university degrees, experience
in public affairs, and worldly polish would give them easy superiority over the uncouth Nazis. Chancellor Hitler would spellbind the crowds, they imagined, while Deputy Chancellor von Papen ran the state.
Hitler’s conservative allies were not the only ones to suppose that Nazism was a flash in the pan. The Communist International was certain that the German swing to the Right under Hitler would produce a counterswing to the Left as soon as German workers understood that democracy was an illusion and turned away from the reformist social democrats. “The current calm after the victory of Fascism is only temporary. Inevitably, despite Fascist terrorism, the revolutionary tide in Germany will grow. . . . The establishment of open Fascist dictatorship, which is destroying all democratic illusions among the masses and is freeing them from the influence of the Social Democrats, will speed up Germany’s progress toward the proletarian revolution." 51
Against the expectations of both Right and Left, Hitler quickly established full personal authority. The first period of Nazi rule saw the Gleichschaltung, the bringing into line, not only of potential enemies but also of conservative colleagues. The keys to Hitler’s success were his superior audacity, drive, and tactical agility; his skillful manipulation (as we saw in the previous chapter) of the idea that imminent communist “terror" justified the suspension of due process and the rule of law; and a willingness to commit murder.
Hitler’s dominance over his conservative allies had clearly been established by the early summer of 1933. By July 14, with the law establishing a one-party state, “an open ‘legal’ struggle against national-socialist domination was now no longer possible."52 Thereafter conservatives fought a rearguard action to defend the autonomy of their remaining centers of power from the encroachment by the Nazi Party’s parallel organizations. This meant defending the army from the SA, state (Land) governments from regional party leaders (Gauleiter), the civil service and professional corps from party novices, the churches from Nazi efforts to create a “German Christianity," and business concerns from SS enterprises.