The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  The conservatives’ main hopes for keeping Hitler in check were President Hindenburg and Deputy Chancellor von Papen.53 Hindenburg’s great age and failing health weakened him, however, and von Papen lacked sufficient personal drive as well as the necessary independent administrative staff to block Nazi penetration of state agencies, especially after he had been replaced by Goering as minister-president of Prussia, the largest German state, on April 7, 1933. When von Papen attacked Nazi arbitrariness openly in a speech at the University of Marburg on June 17, 1934, the text circulated rapidly through the country. Hitler had von Papen’s speechwriter, Edgar Jung, arrested, banned publication of the speech, and closed down the deputy chancellor’s offices. Jung and other von Papen intimates were among those murdered in the Night of the Long Knives two weeks later, on June 30, 1934. The cautious and the ambitious stepped around the bloodstains and went on about their business.54 Von Papen himself departed meekly in July to assume the relatively modest post of ambassador to Austria. The conservatives’ game was up when President Hindenburg died on August 2.

  The conservatives’ defensive wrigglings surfaced again in early 1938, when some of them disagreed with the pace and risk of Hitler’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy. This conflict ended in February 1938 with the removal under humiliating circumstances of the commanding officers of the General Staff and the Army Staff (Generals Blomberg and Fritsch), falsely accused of sexual improprieties. The former corporal took over the military high command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW) in person, and demanded a personal oath from his generals, like the kaiser before him. A number of senior officers wanted to resist the army’s loss of independence, but they would not act without the support of the top commanders.55 The subordination of the army to Hitler was even more complete than it had been to the kaiser.

  Simultaneously the Foreign Office was brought under party control. The career diplomat Konstantin von Neurath was removed as foreign minister on February 5, 1938, and German diplomats had the humiliation of seeing their proud corporation pass under the control of the leader of the party’s parallel organization, Joachim von Ribbentrop, a man whose main international experience before 1933 had been selling German fake champagne in Britain. Under Ribbentrop, old SA men tended to fill diplomatic posts abroad.56

  Since Nazism’s defeat in 1945, German conservatives have made much of their opposition to Hitler and of his hostility to them. As we have seen, Nazis and conservatives had authentic differences, marked by very real conservative defeats. At every crucial moment of decision, however— at each ratcheting up of anti-Jewish repression, at each new abridgment of civil liberties and infringement of legal norms, at each new aggressive move in foreign policy, at each further subordination of the economy to the needs of autarky and hasty rearmament—most German conservatives (with some honorable exceptions) swallowed their doubts about the Nazis in favor of their overriding common interests.

  Conservatives did manage to hamper one Nazi policy: the euthanasia of so-called useless persons, a matter I will discuss more fully in the next chapter. For the rest, while conservative institutions and organizations sought to safeguard their class and personal interests, they rarely challenged the regime itself. Some individual conservatives, such as those who gathered around Helmut von Moltke at his country estate at Kreisau, opposed the regime morally and intellectually and pondered about what form a new Germany should take after the war. Toward the end, when they had finally understood that Hitler was leading Germany to annihilation, some conservative senior officers and civil servants came closest to forming an effective resistance to the Nazi regime and nearly succeeding in assassinating Hitler himself on July 20, 1944.

  Since Mussolini’s regime failed to develop the total reach of Hitler’s, it is often considered less than totalitarian.57 But the same elements vied for power within Fascist Italy as in Nazi Germany: the leader, the party, the state bureaucracy, and civil society. It was the outcome that differed, for power was apportioned among them in rather different ways. Distrustful of his party activists, Mussolini worked to subordinate them to an all-powerful state. At the same time, he was forced by circumstances to share the summit with the king and to placate the much stronger Catholic Church. Party activists fought back with accusations that the Duce was allowing the conservative fellow travelers (fiancheggiattori, literally “flankers") to dilute the movement.58

  The final result in Italy was what some have called “a tougher version of Liberal Italy."59 This view underestimates both the party’s innovations in state organization and propaganda, especially in its dealings with youth and especially during the Ethiopian War, Mussolini’s capacity for arbitrary action, and the degree of latent tension among Duce, party, and conservative elites in the Italian version of the dual state.

  The Tug-of-War between Leader and Party

  In fascist propaganda, and in most people’s image of fascist regimes, leader and party are fused into a single expression of the national will. In reality, there is permanent tension between them, too. The fascist leader inevitably neglects some early campaign promises in his quest for the alliances necessary for power, and thus disappoints some of his radical followers.

  Mussolini had to face down both the partisans of radical squadrismo, like Farinacci, and enthusiasts for “integral syndicalism," like Edmondo Rossoni. Although Hitler always controlled his party more fully than Mussolini, even he confronted dissent many times until he drowned it in blood in June 1934. Before power, the partisans of an authentic “German socialism," a “third way" intermediate between capitalism and Marxism, whom we have already met,60 created embarrassments for him with businessmen whom he wanted to court. There were also those impatient with his all-or-nothing strategy like Walter Stennes and Gregor Strasser. As we have already seen, he did not hesitate to expel the latter two from the party.61

  In the first days of Hitler’s rule, conflict erupted over the “second revolution," a further wave of radical change that would give the spoils of place and position to the “old fighters." In the spring of 1933, party militants celebrated their arrival in power by continuing their street actions against the Left, against the moderate bourgeoisie, and against the Jews. The boycott of Jewish businesses organized by the militant Fighting League of the Commercial Middle Classs in spring 1933 was only one of the more conspicuous examples of “revolution from below." Hitler, however, needed calm and order then instead of challenges to the state’s monopoly of violence, and party leaders announced “the end of the revolution" in the summer of 1933.

  Aspirations for continued “revolution" still percolated within the SA, however, arousing concern in the business community. The SA’s wish to become the armed force of the new regime made the army high command uneasy. Hitler settled these matters far more brutally and decisively than Mussolini in the Night of the Long Knives. The lesson was not lost on other would-be opponents.

  The problem for fascist regimes—a problem traditional dictators never had to face—was how to keep the party’s energy boiling without troubling public order and upsetting conservative allies. Most Nazi Party radicals were kept from troubling the regime by Hitler’s personal control, by the regime’s domestic and foreign successes, and, eventually, by the outlets of war and the murder of the Jews. The occupation of western Europe provided gratifying opportunities for spoliation.62 Things went much further on the eastern front: there the party ran amok with occupation policy, as we will see in the next chapter.

  Mussolini dominated his party, too, but in the face of much more open and durable challenges. The Fascist Party leaders, particularly the local ras, whose exploits during the period of squadrismo gave them a certain autonomous power, often expressed dissatisfaction with Mussolini. There were two sources to these tensions: a functional one, in that Mussolini had different responsibilities as party leader than the local ras and therefore saw things differently; and a personal one, in that Mussolini was more inclined to “normalize" relations with traditional conserva
tives than were some of his hotheaded followers. As we saw, movement and leader quarreled in 1921 over the transformation of the movement into a party, and in August 1921 the ras forced Mussolini to give up his intended pact of pacification with the socialists.

  After power, those divergences became even sharper. Party militants were frustrated by Mussolini’s first two years of moderate coalition government in 1922–24. We saw in chapter 4 how in December 1924 party militants prodded Mussolini to end his six months of indecision after the Matteotti murder and to choose the aggressive way out by establishing one-party rule. 63

  In need of strong party support as he set up his new dictatorship, Mussolini named in February 1925 the most uncompromising partisan of violent squadrismo, Roberto Farinacci, ras of Cremona, to be secretary of the Fascist Party. Farinacci’s appointment looked like a signal of renewed violence against opponents, of party encroachment on the civil service, and of radical social, economic, and foreign policies. 64 Farinacci was dismissed, however, after only a year. Renewed eruptions of violence, such as eight more killings in Florence in October 1925 “in front of the tourists" were intolerable, and it was revealed that Farinacci’s law thesis had been plagiarized. A series of more pliable party secretaries followed who, while increasing the party’s size and reach, subordinated it unquestioningly to the Duce and to the state bureaucracy. In the next chapter, I will take up the continued tension between Mussolini’s instinct for normalization and his periodic episodes of radicalization.

  The Tug-of-War between Party and State

  Both Hitler and Mussolini had to make the machinery of the state work for them, by persuasion or by force. Party militants wanted to sweep away career bureaucrats and take all the places themselves. The leaders almost never gave in to this demand. We have already seen how Hitler sacrificed the SA to the army in June 1934. Similarly, Mussolini prevented the Milizia from invading the professional sphere of the Italian army, except for service in the colonies.

  In general, the Fascist and Nazi regimes had no serious difficulty establishing control over public services. They largely protected civil servants’ turf from party intrusion and left their professional identity intact. Civil servants were frequently in broad sympathy with fascist regimes’ biases for authority and order against parliament and the Left, and they appreciated enhanced freedom from legal restraint.65 Eliminating Jews sometimes opened up career advancement.

  The police were the key agency, of course. The German police were very quickly removed from the normative state and brought under Nazi Party control via the SS. Himmler, supported by Hitler against rivals and the Ministry of the Interior, which traditionally controlled the police, ascended in April 1933 from political police commander of Bavaria (where he set up the first concentration camp at Dachau) to chief of the whole German police system in June 1936.66

  This process was facilitated by the disgruntlement many German police had felt for the Weimar Republic and its “coddling of criminals," 67 and by the regime’s efforts to enhance police prestige in the eyes of the public. By 1937, the annual congratulatory “Police Day" had expanded from one day to seven.68 Initially the SA were deputized as auxiliary police in Prussia, but this practice was ended on August 2, 1933,69 and the police faced no further threat of dilution from party militants. They enjoyed a privileged role above the law as the final arbiters of their own form of unlimited “police justice."

  While the German police were run more directly by Nazi Party chiefs than any other traditional state agency, the Italian police remained headed by a civil servant, and their behavior was little more unprofessional or partisan than under previous governments. This is one of the most profound differences between the Nazi and Fascist regimes. The head of the Italian police for most of the Fascist period was the professional civil servant Arturo Bocchini. There was a political police, the OVRA, but the regime executed relatively few political enemies.

  Another crucial instrument of rule was the judiciary. Although very few judges were Nazi Party members in 1933,70 the German magistracy was already overwhelmingly conservative. It had established a solid track record of harsher penalties against communists than against Nazis during the 1920s. In exchange for a relatively limited invasion of their professional sphere by the party’s Special Courts and People’s Court, the judges willingly submerged their associations in a Nazi organization and happily accepted the powerful role the new regime gave them.71 The Italian judiciary was little changed, since political interference had already been the norm under the liberal monarchy. Italian judges felt general sympathy for the Fascist regime’s commitment to public order and national grandeur.72

  Medical professionals—not strictly part of the state but essential to the regime’s smooth functioning—cooperated with the Nazi regime with surprising alacrity. The Nazis’ determination to improve the biological purity of the “race" (Italian culture was quite different on this point) contained a public health component that gratified many medical professionals. For a long time, the cruel experiments performed on prisoners by Dr. Josef Mengele gave a distorted impression of Nazi medicine. Nazi medicine was not mere sadism, though it did cause much suffering. It embarked on extensive basic public health research. German scientists were the first to link smoking and asbestos conclusively with cancer, for example.73 Improving the “race" also meant encouraging large families, and fascist regimes were particularly active in the development of demographic science in the service of pronatalism. We will see in the next chapter how in Germany, under the pressure of war, improving the race turned into the sterilization of the “unfit" and the elimination of “useless mouths"—the mentally and incurably ill—and from there to ethnic genocide. Nazi administrators were proud of the scientific and bureaucratic care with which they approached these matters, so unlike the Slavs’ disorderly pogroms, and they rewarded doctors and public health professionals with extensive authority over them. Many participated willingly in “medicalized killing." 74

  An “astonishing number" of child welfare professionals, weary of the ideological bickering between public and private and between religious and secular agencies that had nearly paralyzed this field under Weimar, and already turning back toward parental authority and discipline after Weimar’s experimentation, welcomed Nazism in 1933 as a new beginning.75

  The party-state conflict was the most easily and most definitively settled of all the tensions within fascist rule. The Nazi state, in particular, ran vigorously right up to the end, in conscious and determined rejection of any hint of the breakdown of public authority that had occurred in 1918.

  Accommodation, Enthusiasm, Terror

  The dual state model is incomplete in yet one more crucial dimension: it leaves out public opinion. It is not enough to study the way a fascist regime exerted its authority from above; one must also explore how it interacted with its public. Did a majority of the population support fascist regimes consensually, even with enthusiasm, or were they bent to submission by force and terror? The terror model has prevailed, partly because it serves as an alibi for the peoples concerned. But recent scholarship has tended to show that terror was selective and that consensus was high in both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

  Neither regime was conceivable without terror. Nazi violence was omnipresent and highly visible after 1933. The concentration camps were not hidden, and executions of dissidents were meant to be known.76 The publicity of Nazi violence does not mean that support for the regime was coerced, however. Since the violence was directed at Jews, Marxists, and “asocial" outsiders (homosexuals, Gypsies, pacifists, the congenitally insane or crippled, and habitual criminals—groups that many Germans were often happy to see the last of ), Germans often felt more gratified than threatened by it. The rest soon learned to keep silent. Only at the end, as the Allies and the Russians closed in, when the authorities attacked anyone accused of giving in, did the Nazi regime turn its violence upon ordinary Germans.77

  The Italian Fascist pattern of violence
was the opposite of the Nazi one. Mussolini spilled more blood coming to power than Hitler did, 78 but his dictatorship was relatively mild after that. The main form of punishment for political dissidents was forced residence in remote southern hill villages.79 About ten thousand serious opponents of the regime were imprisoned in camps or on offshore islands. The regime sentenced to death a mere nine opponents between 1926 and 1940.80

  But we must avoid the commonplace assumption that Mussolini’s dictatorship was more comic than tragic. His order to assassinate the Rosselli brothers in France in 1937, the articulate leaders of the most important democratic resistance movement, Giustizia e Libertà, along with the notorious murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in June 1924, put indelible bloodstains on his regime. Fascist justice, while several orders of magnitude less vicious than Nazi justice, proclaimed no less boldly the “subordination of individual interests to collective [interests],"81 and one must not forget the spectacular ruthlessness of Italian colonial conquest. 82

  As with the Third Reich, Fascist violence was directed selectively against “enemies of the nation"—socialists, or South Slavic or African peoples who stood in the way of Italian hegemony around the Mediterranean. So it could inspire more approval than fear.

  The popularity-terror dichotomy is obviously much too rigid. Even Nazism did not depend on brute force alone. One remarkable discovery of recent scholarship is how small a police apparatus sufficed to enforce its will. The Gestapo was so well supplied with denunciations from zealous (or jealous) citizens that it could get along with a ratio of about one police officer for ten thousand to fifteen thousand citizens,83 far fewer than the STASI required in the postwar German Democratic Republic.