Good recent guides to Nazi cultural policy are Alan E. Steinweis, Ideology and Economy in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), and National Socialist Cultural Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
Alan Cassels, Mussolini’s Early Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), is still valuable, while H. James Burgwyn, Italian Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period, 1918–1949 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), gives a useful broader survey. A magisterial account of the Third Reich’s foreign policy is Gerhard Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, 1980).
VII. Radicalization
Most works about fascist radicalization concern Nazi Germany, of course. Scholars have debated whether the German rush toward war, expansion, and racial purification was imposed by Hitler or germinated within the fascist governing system. Hans Mommsen’s theory of “cumulative radicalization" appears in, among other publications, “Cumulative Radicalization and Progressive Self-Destruction as Structural Elements of the Nazi Dictatorship," in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 75–87.
Italian Fascism was bloodier than Nazism before power, but Mussolini’s preference for governing through the state rather than through the party “normalized" the regime after 1929. See for this process Lyttleton, Seizure, and Schieder, Der Faschismusals sozialer Bewegung, mentioned above. Nevertheless, the rhetoric and self-image of Italian Fascism remained “revolutionary" (in the nationalist and antisocialist meaning the Fascists gave this word), and authentic radicalization came into view with Italian imperial expansion. See the very interesting chapter entitled “Radicalisation" in Pierre Milza, Mussolini (Paris: Fayard, 1999). In his colonial campaigns, Mussolini took some steps that Hitler never dared take. For example, he used poison gas in Libya and Ethiopia. Angelo Del Boca, I gas di Mussolini: Il fascismo e il guerra d’Etiopia (Rome: Editore Riuniti, 1996). Italian colonial administration was overtly racialist. See Angelo Del Boca, “Le leggi razziali nell’impero di Mussolini" in Del Boca, et al., Il regime fascista, pp. 329–51. The war in Ethiopia also helped stimulate radicalization at home in the mid-1930s.
The best works on Mussolini’s colonial empire are: Claudio Segrè, The Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Angelo Del Boca, The Ethiopian War, 1935–1941 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), and by the same author, among several works on the Italian empire, Le guerre coloniale del fascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1991). Denis Mack Smith in Mussolini’s Roman Empire (New York: Viking, 1976), makes it seem the Duce’s personal whim. Luigi Goglia and Fabio Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano da Adua all’impero (Bari: Laterza, 1993), reminds us that empire was an Italian nationalist urge even before Fascism.
War played a crucial role in radicalization. War was not accidental but integral to the fascist recipe for national regeneration. But while successful German war making opened the way for radical party rule in the east and for the Final Solution, unsuccessful Italian war making broke Fascism’s legitimacy.
The most authoritative account of Germany’s war is now Wilhelm Deist et al., Germany in the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990–), planned for ten volumes. Norman Rich gives a comprehensive account of how Nazi ideology was applied through conquest in Germany’s War Aims, vol. I: Ideology, the Nazi State and the Course of Expansion (New York: Norton, 1973), and vol. II: The Establishment of the New Order (New York: Norton, 1974). Gerhard Weinberg’s collected articles, Germany,Hitler, and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), are often illuminating.
The main authority in English on Italy’s war is MacGregor Knox, who attributes it to Mussolini’s expansionist zeal. See his Mussolini Unleashed, 1939–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Hitler’s Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War, 1940–43 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and the very interesting comparative study, Common Destiny: Dictatorship, Foreign Policy and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Briefer accounts are found in MacGregor Knox, “Conquest, Foreign and Domestic, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany," Journal of Modern History 56 (1984), pp. 1–57, and “Expansionist Zeal, Fighting Power, and Staying Power in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany," in Richard Bessel, ed., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany:Comparisons and Contrasts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 113–33. Aristotle A. Kallis, Fascist Ideology: Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922–1945 (London: Routledge, 2000), asks why territorial expansion was “the way out" for crisis regimes. John F. Coverdale, Italian Intervention in the SpanishCivil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), is still valuable.
The most authoritative work on the Italian Social Republic at Salò is now Lutz Klinkhammer, L’occupazione tedesca in italia 1943–1945 (Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 1993), also in German as Zwischen Bündnis und Besatzung: Das nationalsozialistischeDeutschland und die Republik von Salò 1943–1945 (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1993). The classic work in English is F. W. Deakin’s powerful The Six Hundred Days of Mussolini (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), a revised edition of part III of his authoritative study of the whole German-Italian relationship during World War II, The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler, and the Fall of Italian Fascism (New York: Harper & Row, 1962, revised 1966).
The heart of internal radicalization was an impulse toward cleansing: first of the mentally ill (begun in Germany when the war began), and then of the ethnically and racially impure and the socially ostracized. See in general Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State 1933–45 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus, eds., Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), treats targets of many kinds. On homosexuals in particular, see Harry Osterhuis, “Medicine, Male Bonding, and Homosexuality in Nazi Germany," Journal of Contemporary History 32:2 (April 1997), pp. 187–205; Günter Grau, ed., Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933–1945 (London: Cassell, 1995), and Burkhard Jellonek and Rüdiger Lautmann, eds., Nationalsozialistische Terror gegen Homosexuelle: Verdrängt und Ungesühnt (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002).
The Nazi program to kill or sterilize the mentally ill and other kinds of “unfit" persons, long ignored, now seems a key element of the Nazi brand of fascism, and a decisive difference with Italy. Sterilization was by no means a Nazi monopoly. Sweden, Britain, and the United States came closer to Nazism on this matter than did Italy. See generally Maria Sophia Quine, Population Politics in 20th Century Europe (London: Routledge, 1996). The Swedish case is evoked in Carl Levy, “Fascism, National Socialism, and Conservatives in Europe, 1914–1945: Issues for Comparativists," Contemporary European History 8:1 (1999), p. 120, n. 106. Gisela Bock, Zwang sterilisationim Dritten Reich: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986), finds a Nazi antinatalism to be a precursor of racial annihilation.
The reverse side of Nazi reverence for the fit body was the impulse for medical cleansing, a subject studied intensely nowadays. See Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany, c. 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): His “Between Enthusiasm, Compliance, and Protest: The Churches, Eugenics, and the Nazi Euthanasia Program," Contemporary European History 3:3 (November 1994), pp. 253–63, deals with reactions to euthanasia. The dark side of science in Nazi policy is explored in Detlev J. K. Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science," in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), pp. 234–52. Recent scholarly monographs include Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus,Euthanasie: Von der Verhütung zur Vernichtung “lebensunwerten Lebens” 1890–1945 (G�
�ttingen: Vandenhoech and Ruprecht, 1987); Götz Aly, Angelika Ebbinghaus, Matthias Hamann, Freidrich Pfaflin, and Ger Preissler, Aussonderung und Tod: Die klinische Hinrichtung der Unbrauchbaren (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1985); Götz Aly, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany 1933–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), explores the links between killing the mentally ill and killing Jews.
Works that consider how intellectuals, including nonfascists, became enlisted in fascist projects include Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastward: A Study of Ostforschungin the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Götz Aly and Suzanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1991).
Fascist Italy was more interested in encouraging maternity than in racial cleansing, but Fascists developed a cultural-historical concept of race (la razza) and lineage (la stirpe) that could function very much like biological race in the de facto apartheid set up in Italian East Africa. See David G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction,and Italian Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Angelo Del Boca’s own article in his Il regime fascista. See also Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London: Routledge, 2002).
The best point of entry into the immense literature on the murder of the Jews is the masterful new synthesis by Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997). Peter Longerith, Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998), is an informative recent account. Christopher R. Browning has produced the most convincing current work in English on how the Holocaust was carried out: Ordinary Germans: Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Nazi Policy: Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and the forthcoming Origins of the Final Solution (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, in press). Examples of the very high quality of current Holocaust research in Germany appear in Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policy: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Berghahn, 2000). The newly discovered importance of the broader Nazi project to redraw the East European ethnic map is reflected there, and in Götz Aly, Final Solution: Nazi PopulationPolicy and the Murder of the European Jews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Current knowledge of the Nazi camps is summarized in Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, and Christoph Dieckmann, Die nationalsozialistiche Konzentrationslager:Entwicklung und Struktur, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998).
The literature on Italian racial legislation of 1938 is discussed in chapter 6, note 66, p. 293.
VIII. Fascism Elsewhere
European Fascisms For European fascisms outside Germany and Italy, a good place to begin is the collections of excellent articles in the works mentioned in the opening paragraph of this essay by Stein U. Larsen et al., Stuart Woolf, and Hans Rogger/ Eugen Weber. There are short sketches of fascism in various countries and an extensive bibliography in Enzo Collotti, Fascismo, Fascismi (Florence: Sansoni, 1989). The succinct comparative essay by Wolfgand Wippermann, Europäische Faschismus im Vergleich (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), is very enlightening.
Works on individual European countries follow:
Austria: Authoritative on the forebears is John W. Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Austria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). See also Andrew G. Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools: Von Schönerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975). On the Austrian Nazis, see Bruce E. Pauley, Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Peter Black, Ernst Kaltenbrunner: Ideological Soldier in the Third Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Francis L. Carsten, Fascist Movements in Austria: From Schönerer to Hitler (Los Angeles: Sage, 1977). Lucian O. Meysels, Der Austrofascismus: Das Ende der ersten Republik und ihr letzter Kanzler (Vienna: Amalthea, 1992), treats Kurt Schuschnigg.
Baltic States: Andres Kasekamp, The Radical Right in Interwar Estonia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
Belgium: For the period before 1940, see Jean-Michel Étienne, Le Mouvement Rexiste jusqu’en 1940, Cahiers de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, No. 165 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968); Martin Conway, “Building the Christian City: Catholics and Politics in Inter-War Francophone Belgium," Past and Present 128 (August 1990); the Danièle Wallef article in Larsen et al., Who Were the Fascists; and William Brustein, “The Political Geography of Belgian Fascism: The Case of Rexism," American Sociological Review 53 (February 1988), pp. 69–80. For the period after 1940, see Martin Conway, Collaboration in Belgium: Léon Degrelle and the RexistMovement 1940–1944 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), a work that needs to be combined with John Gillingham’s study of more pragmatic collaborators in the business world, Belgian Business in the Nazi New Order (Ghent: Jan Dondt Foundation, 1977).
Britain: The essential account is Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 1918–1985, rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Thomas Linehan, British Fascism 1918–1939: Parties,Ideology, Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), has additional material on attitudes. For the most important movement, Thomas Linehan, East London for Mosley: The British Union of Fascists in East London and Southwest Essex, 1933–1940 (London: Frank Cass, 1996), is enlightening. Kenneth Lunn and Richard Thurlow, eds., British Fascism: Essays on the Radical Right in Interwar Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1980), is still useful. Robert Skidelsky’s magisterial Oswald Mosley, rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1990) (orig. pub. 1975), was empathetic enough to raise hackles. Richard Thurlow, “The Failure of Fascism," in Andrew Thorpe, ed., The Failure of Political Extremism in Interwar Britain (University of Exeter Studies in History No. 21, 1989), weighs the various interpretations lucidly.
Croatia: Yeshayahu Jelinek, “Clergy and Fascism: The Hlinka Party in Slovakia and the Croatian Ustasha Movement," in Larsen et al., Who Were the Fascists, pp. 367–78.
Czechoslovakia: David D. Kelly, The Czech Fascist Movement, 1922–1942 (Boulder, CO: Eastern European Monographs, 1995).
Eastern Europe: Peter F. Sugar, Native Fascism in the Successor States, 1918–1945 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1971), is more descriptive than analytical.
France: The most authoritative account in French is Pierre Milza, Fascisme français: Passé et présent (Paris: Flammarion, 1987). In English, see Michel Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism in France, trans. from the French by Jane Marie Todd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), and two narrative volumes by Robert Soucy: French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), and French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Milza, “L’Ultra-Droite dans les années Trente," in Michel Winock, ed., Histoire de l’extrème droite en France (Paris: Seuil, 1993), pp. 157–90, and Philippe Burrin, “Le fascisme," in Jean-François Sirinelli, ed., Histoiredes droites en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), vol. I, pp. 603–52, provide stimulating essays. Klaus Jürgen Müller’s richly suggestive “Die französische Rechte und der Faschismus in Frankreich 1924–32," in Industrielle Gesellschaft und politisches System (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1978), pp. 413–30, rejects the usual lists of “symptoms" and analyzes the development of the French Right through time to show that conservatives did not need fascism.
There is fin
ally a biography of Charles Maurras, by Bruno Goyet (Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2000). The English-speaking reader can draw rich detail and perceptive judgments about his movement from Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962). A briefer but usable account is Edward Tannenbaum, Action Française: Die-hard Reactionaries in Third Republic France (New York: Wiley, 1962). Victor Nguyen, Aux origins de l’Action française: Intelligence et politique à l’aube du XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1991), is exhaustive.
Georges Valois has attracted more attention than most French extreme right activists, perhaps because of his genuine ambiguity between Right and Left. See Allen Douglas, From Fascism to Libertarian Communism: Georges Valois against the French Republic (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); Yves Guchet, “Georges Valois ou l’illusion fasciste," Revue française de science politique 15 (1965) p. 1111–44, and Georges Valois: L’Action française, le faisceau, la République syndicale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001); Jules Levey, “Georges Valois and the Faisceau," French Historical Studies 8 (1973), pp. 279–304; and Zeev Sternhell, “Anatomie d’un mouvement fasciste en France: La Faisceau de Georges Valois," Revue française de science politique 26 (1976), pp. 5–40.
Two model regional monographs are Kevin Passmore, From Liberalism to Fascism:The Right in a French Province, 1928–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), on the Lyon area, and Samuel Huston Goodfellow, Between the Swastika and the Cross of Lorraine: Fascisms in Interwar Alsace (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999).
The Anatomy of Fascism Page 33