The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  Like Luebbert, Barrington Moore, Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993) (orig. pub. 1966), puts the farm economy at the center of his analysis, but takes a longer-term perspective on the different paths by which agriculture encountered capitalism in Britain, Germany, and Japan.

  These studies of preconditions for the implanting of fascism emphasize social and economic forces and grievances. William Brustein, The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925–33 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), argues back from membership statistics (problematical) to conclude (controversially) that early party members concluded by rational judgment that the Nazi social program would bring them direct benefits, more than because of passions or hatreds.

  More authors have stressed fascism’s appeal to irrational feelings. The appeal of a masculine fraternity is elaborately illustrated for the Nazi case by Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987–89), though similar fantasies may have existed in countries that did not go fascist. For Italy, see Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Between the wars, the sociologists of the Frankfurt School found Freud as useful as Marx for explaining fascism, an interest that produced Theodor Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Norton, 1982) (orig. pub. 1950). Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1941), argued influentially that modern freedom is so frightening that many people seek the comfort of submission. Peter Loewenburg’s “Psycho-historical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort," American Historical Review 76 (1971), pp. 1457–1502, based his argument more successfully than most psychohistorians on a specific historical context to show how a whole generation of German children was prepared for Nazism by the “Turnip Winter" of 1917 and the absence of fathers, though the children of all belligerent countries suffered the latter. The problem with all psychological explanations is that it is very difficult to prove that the emotional experiences of Italians and Germans differed decisively from those of, say, the French.

  Veterans were a key element in early fascist recruitment (though many were younger). The richest study of any European country’s veterans and the roles they played after 1918 is Antoine Prost, Les Anciens combattants et la société française (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977). For Germany, one may consult the more narrowly political accounts of Volker R. Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1966); Karl Rohe, Das Reichsbanner Schwarz Rot Gold (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1966); and, for the Left, Kurt G. P. Schuster, Der Rote Frontkämpferbund (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1975). Graham Wootton examines the tactics of British veterans in The Politics of Influence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). The standard account of Italian veterans, G. Sabatucci, I combattenti del primo dopoguerra (Bari: Laterza, 1974), covers only the immediate postwar years.

  V. Getting Power

  The most penetrating analysis in any language of Mussolini’s arrival in power is Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Angelo Tasca’s well-informed and compelling The Rise of Italian Fascism:1918–1922 (New York: Howard Fertig, 1966), the work of an ex-socialist exile first published in France in 1938, is still worth reading.

  The most authoritative analysis in English of the contingencies, uncertainties, and choices involved in the last steps of Hitler’s arrival in power is Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996). The most thorough longer-term historical analysis is Karl Dietrich Bracher, Gerhard Schulz, and Wolfgang Sauer, Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung: Studien zur Errichtung des totalitären Herrschaftssystems in Deutschland, 1933–34, 3 vols. (Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1960–62). Gerhard Schulz examines in great detail the way constitutional and political systems evolved during the final crisis in Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur, vol. III: Von Brüning zu Hitler: Der Wandel des politischen systems in Deutschland 1930–33 (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1992). The articles in Peter D. Stachura, ed., The Nazi Machtergreifung (London, Boston: Allen Unwin, 1983), are still useful on the reactions of different social groups. Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), gives a lively account of popular enthusiasm.

  An essential precondition for the fascist achievement of power is the opening of space brought about by the failure of democracy, a subject too often overlooked because so many assume that the fascist leader did everything himself. A rare and valuable study is Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, ed., The Breakdown of DemocraticRegimes: Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); the article on Italy by Paolo Farneti is particularly helpful. The thoughtful essays in Dirk Berg-Schlosse and Jeremy Mitchell, eds., Conditions of Democracy in Europe, 1919–1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), are also relevant.

  On the failure of the Weimar Republic, the classic work is Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik (Villingen: Ring-Verlag, 1960). Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), and Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of ClassicalModernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), are rich and suggestive, while Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic (London, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), wears well. Larry Eugene Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolutionof the Weimar Party System (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), is the most thoughtful account of the collapse of the Weimar political center. Two excellent articles on how another decisive group—farmers—turned to Nazism are Horst Gies, “The NSDAP and Agrarian Organizations in the Final Phase of the Weimar Republic," in Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., ed., Nazism and the Third Reich (New York: Franklin Watts, 1972), and Zdenek Zofka, “Between Bauernbund and National Socialism: The Political Orientation of the Peasants in the Final Phases of the Weimar Republic," in Thomas Childers, ed., The Formation of the Nazi Constituency(London: Croom Helm, 1986). This work is useful from beginning to end.

  Electoral success mattered more for Hitler than for Mussolini. Richard Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), first proved that Hitler’s electoral backing included many upper-class as well as lower-middle-class voters. Since then, computer-assisted studies of the Nazi electorate have established firmer knowledge of the Nazi Party’s success in drawing votes from all classes, though less so from populations well anchored in another community, such as Catholics or Marxists. Class seems to have mattered less than culture. See Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), as well as his aforementioned edited volume, The Formation of the Nazi Constituency; and Jürgen Falter, Hitlers Wähler (Munich: Beck, 1991). Dick Geary, “Who Voted for the Nazis," History Today 48:10 (October 1998), pp. 8–14, summarizes the findings briefly.

  Recent studies of party membership, as distinct from voters, have undermined the lower-middle-class interpretation of fascism and have greatly magnified the working-class role, especially if one adds the SA (many of whom were not party members). Major works here include Detlef Mühlberger, Hitler’s Followers (London: Routledge, 1991), and Conan Fischer, ed., The Rise of National Socialism and the Working Class (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996). Best in a much smaller field for Italy is Jens Petersen, “Elettorato e base sociale del fascismo negli anni venti," Studi storici 3 (1975), pp. 627–69. See in English the article by Marco Revelli on Italy in Detlef Mühlberger, ed., The Social Basis of European Fascist Movements (London: Croom Helm, 1987).

  Useful social analyses of members and voters in many national cases appear in Larsen et al., Who Were the Fascists, and Mühlberger, Social Basis, mentioned above. Studies of fascist movements’ social composition need to distinguish among different stages, for during the movement stage membership fluctuated, while parties
in power enjoyed a bandwagoning effect.

  Emilio Gentile, Storia del Partito Fascista 1919–1922: Movimento e Militia (Bari: Laterza, 1989), is the first serious history of Mussolini’s party. He carries the story further in Fascismo e antifascismo: I partiti italiani fra le due guerre (Florence: Le Monnier, 2000), a work that also analyzes the nonfascist and antifascist parties.

  The Nazi Party has been much more widely studied. The latest is Michael Kater, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919–45 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), while Dietrich Orlow, History of the Nazi Party, 2 vols. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969–73), is more useful for institutional structures than for membership.

  The complicated question of the sources of the Nazis’ money has been put on solid ground by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., who shows, in German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), on the basis of exhaustive studies of business archives, that German industrialists contributed to all non-Marxist parties, that they distrusted Hitler and gave him limited support, and that they preferred that von Papen be chancellor. The Nazis never depended heavily on wealthy contributors, for they drew important sums from rallies and small contributions. The financing of Italian Fascism, less studied, has to be pieced together from De Felice and other biographies. Who paid for Mussolini’s new pro-war newspaper in 1915 is definitively settled by William A. Renzi, “Mussolini’s Sources of Financial Support, 1914–1915," History 56:187 (June 1971), pp. 186–206.

  VI. Exercising Power

  Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London: Arnold, 2000), is a very thoughtful and helpful examination of different intepretations of Nazism in power. A parallel work about Fascist Italy, enlightening despite a testy polemical edge, is R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in Interpreting Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998). Bosworth is highly critical of De Felice, his student Emilio Gentile, and cultural studies. A recent brief overview of Hitler’s regime is Jost Dülffer, Nazi Germany: Faith and Annihilation, 1933–1945 (London: Arnold, 1996).

  It once seemed natural to view fascist societies as homogeneous emanations of the dictator’s will. Today scholars find that how the dictator’s will meshed with society is a much more complex and problematical matter than once assumed: Was the fascist project imposed by force, was it applied by the persuasion of propaganda, or was it negotiated around converging interests with powerful elements in society?

  Earlier studies of the Nazi regime emphasized dictatorial control from above: for example, Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship (New York: Praeger, 1970). See, more briefly, Bracher, “The Stages of Totalitarian Integration," in Hajo Holborn, ed., Republic to Reich: The Making of the Nazi Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1972).

  More recently, emphasis has been placed upon the complexity of the Nazi regime, within which many elements of traditional constitutional government and conservative civil society coexisted with capricious party rule, and in which Hitler arbitrated among competing and overlapping agencies. The founding works about this complexity were Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), with its still-fruitful distinction between the “normative" and “prerogative" states within the Nazi system, and Franz Neumann, Behemoth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942). More recently, Martin Broszat, The Hitler State (London and New York: Longman, 1981), and Hans Mommsen in many works, of which a sample is published in English as From Weimar to Auschwitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), have produced a more sophisticated concept of the complex sharing of power by conservatives and Nazis as “polyocracy." The most complete collection of Hans Mommsen’s writings is Hans Mommsen, Der Nationalsozialismus und die deutsche Gesellschaft: Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Lutz Niethammer and Bernd Weisbrod (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991). A recent brief study of the Nazi regime from this perspective is Norbert Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany:The Führer State, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993; 2nd German ed., 2001). Pierre Ayçoberry revisits these issues in Social History of the Third Reich (New York: New Press, 2000).

  Similarly, the study of Mussolini’s Italy was long dominated by De Felice, who emphasized personal rule and totalitarian aspirations, aided by popular passivity and “consensus." His disciple Emilio Gentile argues in La via italiana al totalitarismo: Il partito e lo Stato nel regime fascista (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1995), that the regime made serious progress in this direction in the 1930s. Though he admits that the totalitarian experiment was incomplete, he is less interested in the problem of how the Fascist project was altered and subverted in the process of its integration into Italian society.

  Massimo Legnani was developing a polycratic analysis of Fascist Italy at his untimely death. His articles were collected posthumously in Legnani, L’Italia dal fascismoalla Repubblica: Sistema de potere e alleanze sociali (Rome: Carocci, 2000), and his approach was taken up by A. de Bernardi, Une dittatura moderna: Il fascismo come problema storico (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001)—the word polycratic even appears (p. 222). See also Philippe Burrin, “Politique et société: Les structures du pouvoir dans l’Italie fasciste et l’Allemagne nazie," Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations43:3 (June 1988).

  Several collections of illuminating articles have given welcome emphasis to the complex and selective way Fascism was integrated into Italian society by Mussolini’s efforts to “normalize" relations with preexisting social powers, or (less successfully) to dominate them. Outstanding for Italy is Angelo Del Boca, Massimo Legnani, and Mario G. Rossi, eds., Il Regime Fascista: Storia et storiografia (Bari: Laterza, 1995). See in English, Roland Sarti, ed., The Ax Within: Fascism in Action (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974). Alberto Aquarone and Maurizio Vernassa, Il regime fascista, new ed. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1974); and Guido Quazza, ed., Fascismo e società italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), the latter a series of well-informed essays by open-minded Marxists, are still interesting. Edward R. Tannenbaum, The Fascist Experience: ItalianSociety and Culture, 1922–1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1972), though dated, has no equivalent in English for life under the dictatorship.

  Salvatore Lupo’s rich Il fascismo: La politica in un regime totalitario (Rome: Donzelli, 2000), takes another innovative look at the complexity of the regime, with its regional variations, personal rivalries, and unfolding radicalization. He is particularly enlightening on the peculiarities of Fascism in the south. Patrizia Dogliani, L’Italia Fascista, 1922–1940 (Milan: Sansoni, 1999), gives a stimulating new survey of how the regime worked up until entry into World War II, with a very full bibliography. Jens Petersen and Wolfgang Schieder, Faschismus und Gesellschaft in Italien: Staat, Wirtschaft, Kultur (Cologne: S. H. Verlag, 1998), contains articles of interest. See also a stimulating discussion among these same scholars and some others in Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Der italienische Faschismus: Probleme und Forschungstendenzen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983).

  The willing cooperation of citizens with fascist regimes and the selective nature of these regimes’ terror, which did not threaten most ordinary citizens, is the subject of an important new line of research, especially for Nazi Germany. Denunciation, the most common form of citizen cooperation with the fascist regimes, made social control possible with an astonishingly small number of police. See Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Backing Hitler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). A superior synthesis for Germany is Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Groundbreaking new works on the Italian repressive system are Mimmo Franzinelli’s very detailed I tentacoli dell’OVRA (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999); Romano Canosa, I servizi segreti del Duce: I persecutore e le vittimi (Milan: Mondadori, 2000); and, for denouncers, Mimmo Franzinelli, I Delatori! (Milan: Mondadori, 2001). Paul Corner gives a timely remind
er of the harsh side of Mussolini’s regime in “Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened to Dictatorship?" in Journal of Modern History 74 (June 2002), pp. 325–51).

  Education and youth organizations were at the heart of the fascist program of social control. For Italy, see George L. Williams, Fascist Thought and Totalitarianism in Italy’s Secondary Schools: Theory and Practice, 1922–1943 (New York: Peter Lang, 1994); Mario Isnenghi, L’educazione dell’italiano: Il fascismo e l’organizzazione della cultura (Bologna: L. Capelli, 1979); Jürgen Charnitsky, Die Schulpolitik des faschistischenRegimes in Italien (1922–1943) (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1994), and “Unterricht und Erziehung im faschistischen Italien: Von der Reform Gentile zur Carta della Scuola," in Jens Petersen and Wolfgang Schieder, eds., Faschismus und Gesellschaftin Italien, mentioned above, pp. 109–32. Doug Thompson, State and Control in Fascist Italy: Culture and Conformity, 1925–1943 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), emphasizes the coercive side.

  The fullest accounts of education under Nazism are Michael Grüttner, Studenten im dritten Reich (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1995), and Geoffrey G. Giles, Students and National Socialism in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). See also Barbara Schneider, Die höhere Schule im Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), and relevant sections of the Peukert work just below.