The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  When street violence erupted again in November 1938 in the synagogue burnings and shop smashings of Kristallnacht, fanned by Goebbels,37 other Nazi authorities sought to channel this grassroots action into a more orderly state policy of “Aryanizing" Jewish businesses. “I have had enough of these demonstrations," Goering complained two days after Kristall nacht.“It is not the Jew they harm but me, as the final authority for coordinating the German economy. . . . The insurance company will pay for the damage, which does not even touch the Jew; and furthermore the goods destroyed come from the consumer goods belonging to the people. . . . We have not come together simply for more talk but to make decisions . . . to eliminate the Jew from the German economy."38 Segregation reached its climax with the marking of the Jewish population. First in occupied Poland in late 1939 and then in the Reich in August 1941, all Jews had to wear a yellow Star of David sewn to the chest of their external garments. By this time, the next phase—expulsion—had already begun.

  The policy of expulsion germinated in the mixture of challenge and opportunity presented by the annexation of Austria in March 1938. This increased the number of Jews in the Reich, and, at the same time, gave the Nazis more freedom to deal harshly with them. The SS officer Adolf Eichmann worked out in Vienna the system whereby wealthy Jews, terrorized by Nazi thugs, would pay well for exit permits, generating funds that could be applied to the expulsion of the others.

  German conquest of the western half of Poland in September 1939 brought further millions of Jews, and an even freer hand in dealing with them. The murder of large numbers of the Polish and Jewish male elite by special military units—the Einsatzgruppen—was an integral part of the Polish campaign, but, for the Jewish population in general, expulsion remained the ultimate aim.

  Trouble arose, however, when individual Nazi satraps tried to expel their Jews into territory governed by another. Many Nazi officials thought of the Nazi-occupied area of former Poland as an ideal dumping ground for Jews, but its governor, Hans Frank, wanted to make his territory a “model colony" by expelling Polish Jews eastward. It was Frank who won the race to Hitler’s ear and stopped the expulsion of German Jews into Poland. 39

  The situation was further complicated by Himmler’s project to resettle some five hundred thousand ethnic Germans from eastern Europe and northern Italy on lands vacated by expelled Jews and Poles.40 This “domino game" of interlocking population movements soon produced a “traffic jam" that some Nazi racial planners thought of relieving in spring and summer 1940 by sending European Jews to the French colony of Madagascar.41

  The Nazis hoped that invading the Soviet Union in June 1941 would make expulsion easier again. Although the anticipated rapid conquest of Soviet territory would bring millions more Jews into Nazi hands, it would also open up the vast Russian hinterland into which to expel them. These hopes maintained expulsion as the official Nazi solution to the “Jewish Problem" until late in 1941.

  Close studies of Nazi-occupied territories in Poland and the Soviet Union between September 1939 and late 1941, however, show surprising amounts of individual leeway and local variation among Nazi administrators in their treatment of Jews. Left to cope on their own with unexpectedly severe problems of security, supply, land tenure, and disease, they experimented with all sorts of local initiatives—ghettoization, forced labor, resettlements. 42 In the newly occupied Baltic States and eastern Poland some Nazi administrators crossed the line from killing Jewish men for “security" reasons to the mass murder of whole Jewish populations, including women and children, as early as August–September 1941, apparently on local initiative (confident, of course, of Berlin’s approval).43 Seen from this perspective, the famous meeting of high-level Nazi leaders under the chairmanship of Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich on January 20, 1942 (the Wannsee Conference), looks more like further state coordination of local extermination initiatives than the initiation of a new policy from above.

  Exactly when and why the old policy of expulsion, punctuated by the murder of many Jewish men for “security" reasons, gave way in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe to a new policy of total extermination of all Jews, including women and children, remains one of the most hotly debated issues in interpreting the Holocaust. It is not even certain whether we should focus on Hitler or on his underlings in the field. If we focus on Hitler, the absence of any trace of an explicit Führer order for the final stage of annihilation has caused trouble to the “intentionalists," probably unnecessarily. No serious scholar doubts Hitler’s central responsibility.44 The Führer’s unswerving hatred of Jews was known to all, and he was briefed regularly on what was going on.45 Local administrators knew he would “cover" their most extreme actions. It is likely that he issued some kind of verbal order in fall 1941 in response to the ongoing campaign against Soviet Russia: either in the euphoria of the first advance, 46 or, more likely, in rage as he failed to take Moscow before winter and achieve the Blitzkrieg victory upon which the whole operation depended. 47 A recent plausible theory locates Hitler’s order in a secret speech to high party officials on December 12, 1941, in reaction to the entry of the United States into the war and its transformation into a truly worldwide conflict. Hitler would thus be fulfilling the threat he made in a speech on January 30, 1939—that if the war became worldwide, the Jews were to blame and would pay (Hitler believed Jews controlled American policy). 48

  If we shift our focus to the administrators in the field, we have seen how some of them had already crossed the line in late summer 1941 between the selective killing of adult males and the total extermination of the whole Jewish population. This would not have been possible without widespread, murderous Jew-hatred, one point on which Daniel Goldhagen’s celebrated and controversial Hitler’s Willing Executioners is right. But the existence of widespread, murderous Jew-hatred does not tell us why the line was crossed in certain places at certain times, and not others. The most convincing studies present a dynamic process of “cumulative radicalization" in which problems magnify, pressures build, inhibitions fall away, and legitimating arguments are found.

  Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to kill all Jews, including women and children. One is a series of “dress rehearsals" that served to lower inhibitions and provided trained personnel hardened for anything. First came the euthanasia of incurably ill and insane Germans, begun on the day when World War II began. Nazi eugenics theory had long provided a racial justification for getting rid of “inferior" persons. War provided a broader justification for reducing the drain of “useless mouths" on scarce resources. The “T-4" program killed more than seventy thousand people between September 1939 and 1941, when, in response to protests from the victims’ families and Catholic clergy, the matter was left to local authorities.49 Some of the experts trained in this program were subsequently transferred to the occupied east, where they applied their mass killing techniques to Jews. This time, there was less opposition.

  The second “dress rehearsal" was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, the intervention squads specially charged with executing the political and cultural elite of invaded countries. In the Polish campaign of September 1939 they helped wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and high civil service, evoking some opposition within the military command. In the Soviet campaign the Einsatzgruppen received the notorious “Commissar Order" to kill all Communist Party cadres as well as the Jewish leadership (seen as identical in Nazi eyes), along with Gypsies. This time the army raised no objections.50 The Einsatzgruppen subsequently played a major role, though they were far from alone, in the mass killings of Jewish women and children that began in some occupied areas in fall 1941.

  A third “dress rehearsal" was the intentional death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. It was on six hundred of them that the Nazi occupation authorities first tested the mass killing potential of the commercial insecticide Zyklon-B at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941.51 Most Soviet prisoners of war, however, were simply worked or starved to death.


  The second category of developments that helped prepare a “willingness to murder" consisted of blockages, emergencies, and crises that made the Jews become a seemingly unbearable burden to the administrators of conquered territories. A major blockage was the failure to capture Moscow that choked off the anticipated expulsion of all the Jews of conquered eastern Europe far into the Soviet interior. A major emergency was shortages of food supplies for the German invasion force. German military planners had chosen to feed the invasion force with the resources of the invaded areas, in full knowledge that this meant starvation for local populations. When local supplies fell below expectations, the search for “useless mouths" began. In the twisted mentality of the Nazi administrators, Jews and Gypsies also posed a security threat to German forces. Another emergency was created by the arrival of trainloads of ethnic Germans awaiting resettlement, for whom space had to be made available.

  Faced with these accumulating problems, Nazi administrators developed a series of “intermediary solutions."52 One was ghettos, but these proved to be incubators for disease (an obsession with the cleanly Nazis), and a drain on the budget. The attempt to make the ghettos work for German war production yielded little except another category of useless mouths: those incapable of work. Another “intermediary solution" was the stillborn plan, already mentioned, to settle European Jews en masse in some remote area such as Madagascar, East Africa, or the Russian hinterland. The failure of all the “intermediary solutions" helped open the way for a “final solution": extermination.

  The first mass executions were accomplished by gunfire, a process that was slow, messy, and psychologically stressful for the killers (though many became inured to it). The search for more-efficient killing techniques led to the development of specially prepared vans, Gaswagen, into which exhaust fumes were piped, an idea derived from the trailers in which the mentally ill had been gassed by carbon monoxide in Poland in 1940. In fall 1941 thirty such vans were constructed for the wholesale liquidation of Jewish populations in occupied Russia.53 Even faster technology was adopted in spring 1942 when fixed killing installations were constructed at six camps on former Polish territory. Most of these continued to use carbon monoxide, but some, notably Auschwitz, used the quicker and more easily handled Zyklon-B. The death factories eventually accounted for 60 percent of the Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II.

  The new centers for industrialized mass killing were constructed outside the reach of the German normative state and of German law. Two (Auschwitz and Chelmno) were in territory annexed from Poland in 1939, and the other four (Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Belzec) were located in the former Polish lands now known as the “Generalgouvernement.” 54 There military authorities shared power with civilian officials largely composed of party militants.

  In captured areas of Poland and the Soviet Union, parallel organizations like the party’s agency that seized land for redistribution to German peasants (the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt) had more freedom than in the Reich. The SS set up its own military-economic empire there where the normative state played hardly any role at all.55 In that no-man’s-land, both bureaucratic regularity and moral principles were easily set aside, and the needs of the master race became the only criteria for action. The traditional contempt of German nationalists for Slavic Untermenschen aggravated the permissive climate. In that nameless nonstate, Nazi zealots had free rein to fulfill their wildest fantasies of racial purification without interference from a distant normative state.

  The fragmented Nazi administrative system left the radicals unaccountable, and able to enact their darkest impulses. The Führer, standing above and outside the state, was ready to reward initiative in the jungle of Nazi administration of the eastern occupied territories.

  We can dismiss any notion that the Nazi regime murdered Jews in order to gratify German public opinion. It took elaborate precautions to hide these actions from the German people and from foreign observers. In official documents the responsible authorities referred to the killings with euphemisms like Sonderbehandlung (“special handling"), and undertook major operations to eliminate all traces of them, at a time when men and materiel could hardly be spared from the fighting.56 At the same time, there was no particular effort to keep the secret from German troops on the eastern front, many of whom were regularly assigned to participate. Some soldiers and officials photographed the mass executions and sent pictures home to their families and girlfriends.57 Many thousands of soldiers, civil administrators, and technicians stationed in the eastern occupied territories were eyewitnesses to mass killings. Many more thousands heard about them from participants. The knowledge inside Germany that dreadful things were being done to Jews in the east was “fairly widespread."58 As long as disorderly destruction such as the shop-front smashings, beatings, and murders of Kristallnacht did not take place under their windows, most of them let distance, indifference, fear of denunciation, and their own sufferings under Allied bombing stifle any objections.

  In the end, radicalized Nazism lost even its nationalist moorings. As he prepared to commit suicide in his Berlin bunker in April 1945, Hitler wanted to pull the German nation down with him in a final frenzy. This was partly a sign of his character—a compromise peace was as unthinkable for Hitler as it was for the Allies. But it also had a basis within the nature of the regime: not to push forward was to perish. Anything was better than softness.59

  Italian Radicalization: Internal Order, Ethiopia, Salò

  Nazi Germany in its final paroxysm is the only authentic example so far of the ultimate stage of fascist radicalization. Italian Fascism, too, displayed some signs of the forces that drive all fascisms toward the extreme.

  We saw earlier in this chapter how Mussolini was torn between the radical wishes of the ras and the squadristi and his own preference for order and state predominance over the party. But he could not escape from his self-promoted image as activist hero, and his language remained colored with revolutionary imagery. He could not ignore entirely his followers’ need for fulfillment and the public’s expectation of dramatic achievements that he had himself encouraged.

  In the 1930s, perhaps with the already mentioned aim of rejuvenating his paunchy Blackshirts, perhaps also under pressure to divert his people’s attention from Italy’s mediocre economic performance during the Depression, Mussolini embarked on a farther-reaching period of radicalization. After 1930 he had already adopted a more aggressive tone in foreign policy, calling for rearmament and predicting that “the twentieth century will be the century of Fascism."60 He took back into his own hands in 1932 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 1933 the Ministries of War, the Navy, and Air. By 1934 he was secretly preparing a military operation in Ethiopia. Taking as a pretext a minor skirmish in December 1934 at Wal-wal, a remote desert waterhole near the unmarked frontier between Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland (now Eritrea), Mussolini launched his armies against Ethiopia on October 3, 1935.

  After a one-sided campaign that required more Italian effort than foreseen, Mussolini was able to proclaim victory and declare King Victor Emmanuel III emperor of Ethiopia on May 9, 1936. From the balcony of his offices in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, Mussolini engaged in a triumphal dialogue with the excited crowd:

  Officers, non-commissioned officers, soldiers of all the armed forces of the State in Africa and Italy, Blackshirts of the Revolution, Italian men and women in the fatherland and throughout the world, listen!

  Our gleaming sword has cut all the knots, and the African victory will remain in the history of the fatherland complete and pure, a victory such as the legionaries who have fallen and those who have survived dreamed of and willed. . . .

  The Italian people has created the empire with its blood. It will fertilize it with its labor and defend it with its arms against anybody whomsoever. Will you be worthy of it? Crowd: Yes!61

  The Ethiopian War gave the Fascist Party a “new impulse." 62 At home, it was the occasion for a masterly bit of nationalist theater
: the collection of gold wedding rings from the women of Italy, from Queen Elena on down, to help pay for the campaign. Officially it was the Fascist Militia (MVSN) that went to fight in Ethiopia. The party presence was strong in the conquered territory. The party Federale shared power with the prefect and the army commander, and attempted to regiment both the settler population and young Ethiopians through Fascist youth and leisure organizations. Colonial rule even permitted a revival of squadrismo, long shut down at home. In 1937, after an assassination attempt on General Graziani, governor-general and viceroy, party activists terrorized the inhabitants of Addis Ababa for three days and killed hundreds of them.63

  The excitement and effort of war were accompanied by a “cultural revolution" and a “totalitarian leap" (svolta totalitaria) at home. 64 Another activist party secretary, Achille Starace (1931–39), led a campaign to shape the Fascist “new man" by instituting “Fascist customs," “Fascist language," and racial legislation. The “reform of custom" replaced the deferential and formal way of saying “you" in the third person (“lei”), used by proper bourgeois, by the more familiar and comradely second person (“tu” in the singular, “voi” in the plural).65 The Fascist salute replaced the bourgeois handshake. Civil servants were dressed in uniform, and the army began to march with the exaggerated high step that the regime called passo romano to make clear that it was not copied from the Nazi goose step.