Fascist efforts to mobilize youth are treated by Tracy Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), and Gerhard Rempel, Hitler’s Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Detlev Peukert reveals their failure in fascinating chapters on the “Edelweiss Pirates," enthusiasts of swing, and other nonconformist youth in Nazi Germany in Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway, eds., Political Catholicism in Europe, 1918–1965 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), is a good starting point for the Catholic Church’s responses to fascism and to communism (considered the greater threat). See also the more specialized articles in Richard J. Wolff and Jörg K. Hoensch, Catholics, the State, and the European Radical Right (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1987). The classic works for Italy are Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Church and State in Italy, 1850–1960, trans. D. Moore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), and Daniel A. Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941). These may now be supplemented by John F. Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism,1929–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Peter Kent, The Pope and the Duce (London: Macmillan, 1981).
For the all-important bureaucracy, the classic work is Hans Mommsen, Beamtentumim dritten Reich (Stuttgart: Verlags-Anstalt, 1966). Best in English is Jane Caplan, Government without Administration: State and Civil Service in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). An excellent introduction to the Italian civil service under Fascism is Guido Melis, “La burocrazia," in Angelo Del Boca et al., Il regime fascista, pp. 244–76. Mariuccia Salvati, Il regime e gli impiegati: La nazionalizzazione piccolo-borghese nel ventennio fascista (Bari: Laterza, 1992), places the subject within the social history of modern Italy.
Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), is the classic work on civil-military relations in Germany. The most recent is Klaus-Jürgen Müller, Army, Politics and Society in Germany, 1933–1945 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1987). The preeminent expert on the Italian army is Giorgio Rochat, in many works, including Breve storia dell’esercito italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1978).
A particularly productive vein of research nowadays explores ways in which fascist regimes established links with the professions and with other organized interests. The close implication of the medical profession in Nazi purification projects has attracted special attention: Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Michael Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors (New York: Basic Books, 1986). The legal professions, equally crucial, have been less studied. The most authoritative for Germany is Lothar Gruchmann’s massive Justiz im dritten Reich: Anpassung und Unterwerfung der Ära Gürtner (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988). In English, see the less complete Ingo Muller, Hitler’s Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), and sections of Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). The main authority on the Italian judiciary is Guido Neppi Modono, who takes a skeptical view of its independence even before Fascism in Sciopero, potere politico e magistratura (1870–1922) (Bari: Laterza, 1969), and addresses the judiciary under fascism more directly in the Del Boca and Quazza volumes mentioned above.
The relationship between business concerns and the Nazi regime is the subject of several exemplary monographs. Peter Hayes shows in Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), how the giant chemical consortium, which would have preferred to continue the regime of free trade within which it had become the largest corporation in Europe in the 1920s, adapted itself to Nazi autarky and profited mightily, motivated more by a narrow business success ethic and an eye for opportunity than by ideological enthusiasm for Nazism. Daimler-Benz was more enthusiastic, according to Bernard P. Bellon, Mercedesin Peace and War: German Automobile Workers, 1903–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). The rather successful effort of the insurance business to keep some independence is authoritatively treated by Gerald D. Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
The successful maneuvers by Italian business executives to become the managers of Mussolini’s corporatist economic system and retain an area of “private power" within Fascism are explored by Roland Sarti, Fascism and the Industrial Leadership in Italy, 1919–1940: A Study in the Expansion of Private Power under Fascism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971). Sarti argues that the industrialists got most of what they wanted. Similar conclusions, with deeper background in earlier Italian history, are found in F. H. Adler, Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism: The Political Development of the Industrial Bourgeoisie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Among Italian scholars, Piero Melograni, Gli industriali e Mussolini: Rapporti fra Confindustria e fascismo dal 1919 al 1929 (Milan: Longanesi, 1972), has been criticized for overemphasizing conflicts between supposedly laissez-faire industrialists and Fascism. Franco Castronovo, Potere economico et fascismo (Milan: Bompiani, 1974), stresses the advantages enjoyed by business during the Fascist regime. See also his article “Il potere economico e fascismo," in Guido Quazza, ed., Fascismo e società italiano (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), pp. 45–88, and his important biography of FIAT chief Agnelli. Rolf Petri, “Wirtschaftliche Führungskräfte und Regime: Interessen, Wertvorstellungen und Erinnerungsprozesse zwischen Konsens und Krise," in Jens Petersen and Wolfgang Schieder, eds., Faschismus und Gesellschaft in Italien: Staat, Wirtschaft, Kultur (Cologne: SH-Verlag, 1998), pp. 199–223, analyzes the bases for business leaders’ general cooperation with the regime, despite some divergence of interests and values, until defeat became evident in spring 1943.
The best introduction to the relations between fascists and conservatives generally is Martin Blinkhorn, ed., Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth Century Europe (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), to which may be added Jeremy Noakes, “Fascism and High Society," in Michael Burleigh, ed., Confronting the Nazi Past: New Debates on Modern German History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy, 1860–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), has an excellent synoptic chapter on Fascist Italy.
For the relationship of the Nazi and Fascist regimes with workers, the most important work is Jane Caplan, ed., Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class: Essays by Tim Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 131–211. Also by Mason, the most thoughtful scholar of labor under the Nazis, is Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft: Dokumente und Materialen zu deutscher Arbeiterpolitik, 1936–1939 (Berlin: Freier Universität, 1975). Alf Lüdtke suggests why some workers supported Hitler in “Working Class and Volksgemeinschaft," in Christian Leitz, The Third Reich: The Essential Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), and in “What Happened to the ‘Fiery Red Glow’?" in Lüdtke, ed., History of Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1995), pp. 198–251. Ulrich Herbert explores relations between German workers and foreign slave labor and the resulting satisfactions for the former in Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor under the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and other works. The standard of living, including that of women, is examined by Richard J. Overy, “Guns or Butter: Living Standards, Finance and Labour in Germany, 1939–1942," in Overy, War and the Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
For the Italian case, see Tobias Abse, “Italian Workers and Italian Fascism," in Richard Bessel, ed., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 40–60, and the articles collected in Giulio Sapelli, ed., La classe operaia durante il fascismo (Annali Feltrinelli, vol. 20:
Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981).
Nazi gender policy is the subject of an enormous literature. Basic works include Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (New York: Longman’s, 2001); Renata Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny:Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984); Claudia Koontz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987); Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeoise Emancipation to Sexual Liberation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Tim Mason, “Women in Germany, 1925–1940," History Workshop, 1:1 & 2 (1976); Rita Thalmann, Femmes et fascisme (Paris: Tierce, 1987); Gisela Bock, “Nazi Gender Policies and Women’s History," in Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, eds., A History of Women: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 149–77; Helen Boak, “Women in Weimar Germany: The ‘Frauenfrage’ and the Female Vote," in Richard Bessel and E. J. Feuchtwanger, eds., Social Change and Political Development in the Weimar Republic (London: Croom Helm, 1981); Gabriele Czarnowski, “The Value of Marriage for Volksgemeinschaft: Policies towards Women and Marriage under National Socialism," in Richard Bessel, ed., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, pp. 61–77. For the late resort to women workers, see the article by Richard Overy cited above. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), includes, innovatively, a chapter on men as well as on women.
The indispensable work on women in Fascist Italy is Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), a concise version of which appears in Duby and Perrot, eds., A History of Women, cited above. Perry R. Willson, “Women in Fascist Italy," in Richard Bessel, ed., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, pp. 78–93, and the Luisa Passerini and Chiara Saraceno articles in Angelo Del Boca et al., eds., Il Regime Fascista, are up-to-date surveys, and one can still consult the earlier articles of Lesley Caldwell, “Reproducers of the Nation: Women and the Family in Fascist Party," in David Forgacs, Rethinking Fascist Italy (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), and Alexander De Grand, “Women Under Italian Fascism," Historical Journal 19:4 (December 1976), pp. 947–68. Paul Corner, “Women in Fascist Italy: Changing Family Roles in the Transition from an Agricultural to an Industrial Society," European Studies Quarterly 23 (1993), pp. 51–68, sets the issue into a longer-term perspective. Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), uses oral history to reconstruct the everyday life of women in Turin under Fascism. Perry R. Willson, The Clockwork Factory: Women and Work in Fascist Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), gives a fascinating glimpse of the satisfactions and grievances of women in a Fascist showpiece factory.
Fascism has been provocatively called “a boy’s ideology," 3 though some women supported it eagerly and were assisted by it selectively and in demeaningly paternalistic ways. Richard Evans studied the female vote in “German Women and the Triumph of Hitler," Journal of Modern History (March 1976) (supplement). A particularly heated debate over whether German women were victims or collaborators of Nazism is reviewed by Atina Grossmann, “Feminist Debates about Women and National Socialism," in Gender and History 3:3 (Autumn 1991), pp. 350–58, and Adelheid von Saldern, “Women: Victims or Perpetrators?" in David F. Crew, ed., Nazism and GermanSociety, 1933–1945 (London: Routledge, 1994), reprinted in Christian Leitz, The Third Reich: The Essential Readings, mentioned above.
Peasants and small farmers, important among early supporters of Fascism and Nazism, did not always benefit from these parties’ exercise of power. For Nazi agrarian policy, see J. E. Farquharson, The Plough and the Swastika (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), summarized in Farquharson, “The Agrarian Policy of National Socialist Germany," in Robert G. Moeller, ed., Peasants and Lords in Modern Germany: Recent Studies in Agricultural History (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), pp. 233–59; and Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darré and Hitler’s “Green Party” (Abbotsbrook: Kensal, 1985).
The large role played by agrarian conflict in the beginnings of fascism is treated in many local studies listed above. The Italian case is reviewed in Mario Bernabei, “La base de masse del fascismo agraria," Storia contemporanea 6:1 (1975), pp. 123–53, and Dahlia Sabina Elazar, “Agrarian Relations and Class Hegemony: A Comparative Analysis of Landlord, Social and Political Power in Italy, 1861–1970," in British Journal of Sociology 47 (June 1996), pp. 232–54. Fascist Italy’s farm policy is discussed by Paul Corner, “Fascist Agrarian Policy and the Italian Economy in the Interwar Years," in John A. Davis, ed., Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1979), and examined thoroughly in Alexander Nützenadel, Landwirtschaft, Staat, und Autarkie: Agrarpolitik in faschistischen Italien (Tübingen: Max Niemayer Verlag, 1997).
Some of the most suggestive works about how fascist rule worked are based on comparison between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. There is a tendency to treat this subject by paired articles rather than sustained comparison. Nevertheless the articles are of high quality in Richard Bessel, ed., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisonsand Contrasts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Wolfgang Schieder, ed., Faschismus als sozialer Bewegung: Deutschland und Italien im Vergleich(Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1976). More articles of high quality pair Nazi Germany with Stalinist Russia, in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, eds., Stalinismand Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Henri Rousso, ed., Stalinisme et nazisme: Histoire et mémoire comparées (Brussels: Complexe, 1999). Authentic sustained comparison between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy is found in Alexander J. De Grand’s succinct Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The “Fascist” Style of Rule (London: Routledge, 1995), and a very interesting article, Carlo Levy, “Fascism, Nazism, and Conservatism: Issues for Comparativists," Contemporary European History 8:1 (1999).
Articles of enduring value about the way the Nazi regime functioned are collected in Peter D. Stachura, ed., The Shaping of the Nazi State (London: Croom Helm, 1978); Jeremy Noakes, ed., Government, Party and People in Nazi Germany (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1980); Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993); David Crew, ed., Nazism and German Society (London: Routledge, 1994); Michael Burleigh, ed., Confrontingthe Nazi Past (see above); and Christian Leitz, ed., The Third Reich: The Essential Readings (see above).
Studies of public opinion in the 1980s emphasized the high degree of public acceptance of both the German and Italian dictatorships, despite surprising amounts of grumbling that mostly spared the charismatic leaders. See Ian Kershaw, “The Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Bavaria 1933–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), part of a close scrutiny of Bavaria under the Third Reich organized by Martin Broszat. For Italy, the fullest account is Simona Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime, 1929–1943 (Bari: Laterza, 1991). The works already cited on citizens’ voluntary cooperation, such as Robert Gellately’s works on denunciation in Germany, are relevant here.
Alastair Hamilton explores for the general reader some intellectuals’ support for Hitler and Mussolini in The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism, 1919–1945 (London: Anthony Blond, 1971). The best place to start for a general history of political ideas in Italy is Norberto Bobbio, Ideological Profile of Twentieth Century Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). The basic works in Italian on intellectuals under Fascism are Luisa Mangoni, L’interventismo della cultura: Intellettualie riviste del fascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1974); Gabriele Turi, Il fascismo e il consensodegli intellettualli (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980); and Michel Ostenc, Intellectuels italiens et fascisme (1915–1929) (Paris: Payot, 1983). The c
ollected essays of Mario Isnenghi, L’Italia del Fascio (Florence: Giunti, 1996), includes his famous essay on “militant intellectuals and bureaucratic intellectuals." Stimulating short assessments are Norberto Bobbio, “La cultura e il fascismo," in Guido Quazza, ed., Fascismo e società italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), pp. 211–46, and Gabriele Turi, “Fascismo e cultura ieri e oggi," in Angelo Del Boca et al., eds., Il regime fascista. A lively introduction to Marinetti is James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics (New York: Pantheon, 1960).
An immense and growing literature is now devoted to a deconstruction of the inner meaning of fascist regimes’ cultural projects and rituals. Some examples of this genre that successfully relate culture to institutions and society include Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Marla Stone, The Patron State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998): a special issue on “The Aesthetics of Fascism" of The Journal of Contemporary History 31:2 (April 1996); two special issues on “Fascism and Culture" of Modernism/Modernity 2:3 (September 1995) and 3:1 (January 1996); and Richard J. Golsan, ed., Fascism, Aesthetics and Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992). Sometimes works in this genre seem to take the decoding of fascist ritual and art as ends in themselves. David D. Roberts reviews a wide range of cultural studies of fascism with some asperity in “How Not to Think about Fascist Ideology, Intellectual Antecedents, and Historical Meaning," Journal of Contemporary History 35:2 (April 2000), pp. 185–211. Roger Griffin does the same with enthusiasm in “The Reclamation of Fascist Culture," European History Quarterly 31:4 (October 2001), pp. 609–20.
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