The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  47. Hitler dazzled electoral meetings by arriving dramatically by plane. Mussolini was an active pilot. During a state visit to Germany he frightened Hitler by insisting on taking the controls of the Führer’s official Condor (Milza, Mussolini, pp. 794–95). Fascist Italy invested heavily in aviation for prestige, and won world records for speed and distance in the 1930s. See Claudio G. Segrè, Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), part II, “The Aviator." For the British fascist leader Mosley, another pilot, see Colin Cook, “A Fascist Memory: Oswald Mosley and the Myth of the Airman," European Review of History 4:2 (1997), pp. 147–62.

  48. In the older literature, two kinds of approach tended to put a revolt against modernity at the heart of Nazism: studies of cultural preparations, such as George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), and Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961); and studies of lower-middle -class resentment, such as Talcott Parsons, “Democracy and Social Structure in Pre-Nazi Germany," in Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954), pp. 104–23 (orig. pub. 1942), and Heinrich A. Winkler, Mittelstand, Demokratie und Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1972). Italy has no equivalent literature—an important difference.

  49. A. James Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Rainer Zitelmann, Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs, expanded new ed. (Munich: F. A. Habig, 1998). Zitelmann admits that he presents a Hitler who might have been, had he won the war, and not the “current economic and social reality" of the regime when the Führer had to “take the views of his conservative alliance partners into account" (pp. 47–48, 502). Articles in the same perspective are collected in Michael Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann, eds., Nationalsozialismus und Modernizierung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991).

  50. A. F. K. Organski, “Fascism and Modernization," in Stuart J. Woolf, ed., Nature of Fascism (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 19–41, believes that fascism is likeliest at the vulnerable middle point of a transition to industrial society, when the numerous victims of industrialization can make common cause with a remaining pre-industrial elite.

  51. A partial list would include Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and Gertrude Stein, all of whom employed experimental literary techniques to criticize modern society.

  52. Mussolini had his autostrade, Hitler his Autobahnen, which served job creation as well as symbolic ends. See James D. Shand, “The Reichsautobahn: Symbol of the Third Reich," Journal of Contemporary History 19:2 (April 1984), pp. 189–200.

  53. The classic study of this process for Germany is David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (New York: Doubleday, 1966). For Italy, see the wide-ranging analysis of Tim Mason, “Italy and Modernization," History Workshop 25 (Spring 1988), pp. 127–47.

  54. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 11, 14–17.

  55. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), finds the two reconciled in a German cultural tradition of using technology to manage the stresses of modernization. According to Henry A. Turner, Jr., “Fascism and Modernization," in World Politics 24:4 (July 1972), pp. 547–64, reprinted in Turner, ed., Reappraisalsof Fascism (New York: Watts, 1975), pp. 117–39, Nazism instrumentalized modernity in order to achieve an antimodern agrarian utopia in the conquered east.

  56. Hans Mommsen sees Nazism as “simulated modernization," the application of modern techniques to irrational destruction and the willful dismantling of the modern state. See Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als Vorgetäuschte Modernisierung," in Mommsen, Der Nationalsozialismus und die Deutsche Gesellschaft: Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Lutz Niethammer and Bernd Weisbrod (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), pp. 405ff; “Noch einmal: Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 21:3 (July-September 1995), pp. 391–402; and “Modernität und Barbarei: Anmerkungen aus zeithistorische Sicht," in Max Miller and Hans-Georg Soeffner, eds., Modernität und Barbarei: Soziologische Zeitdiagnose am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), pp. 137–55.

  57. The Americans, the British, and even the Swedes were important pioneers in forced sterilization, followed closely by the Germans. See Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985). Biological racism was much weaker in Catholic southern Europe, but Mussolini announced a policy of “social hygiene and national purification [profilassi]" in his most important policy statement after the establishment of the dictatorship, the Ascension Day Speech of May 16, 1927. For Nazi Germany’s medical “purification" policies and Fascist Italy’s promotion of la razza and la stirpe (lineage), understood culturally and historically, see bibliographical essay, pp. 238–40.

  58. This thesis was argued provocatively by the late Detlev 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. See also Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 149: “Considered as a complex, purposeful operation, the Holocaust may be seen as a paradigm of modern bureaucratic rationalism. Almost everything was done to achieve maximum results with minimum cost and effort."

  59. P. Sabini and Mary Silvers, “Destroying the Innocent with a Clear Conscience: A Sociopsychology of the Holocaust," in Joel E. Dimsdale, ed., Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays in the Nazi Holocaust (Washington: Hemisphere Publishing Corp., 1980), pp. 329–30, quoted in Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust,pp. 89–90.

  60. The issue is critically reviewed by Carl Levy, “From Fascism to ‘post-Fascists’: Italian Roads to Modernity," and Mark Roseman, “National Socialism and Modernization," in Richard Bessel, ed., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 165–96 and 197–229. Detlev K. Peukert wove these themes fruitfully into his fine work The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, translated from the German by Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991).

  61. A brilliant example is Tim Mason, “The Origins of the Law on the Organization of National Labour of 20 January 1934: An Investigation into the Relationship Between ‘Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Elements in Recent Germany History," in Caplan, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, pp. 77–103.

  62. Kristallnacht was the Nazis’ first and last collective murder of Jews carried out in the streets of German cities—the last pogrom as much as the beginning of the Holocaust (Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 89). For the public reaction, see William S. Allen, “Die deutsche Öffentlichkeit und die Reichskristallnacht— Konflikte zwischen Wertheirarchie und Propaganda im Dritten Reich," in Detlev Peukert and Jürgen Reulecke, eds., Die Reihe fast geschlossen: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alltags unterm Nationalsozialismus (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1981), pp. 397–412, and public opinion studies cited in chapter 9.

  63. Martin Broszat, “A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism," in Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), p. 127.

  64. “Historicizing" fascism sets off alarm bells. When Martin Broszat argued for treating Nazism as part of history instead of abstractly as an emblematic image of evil (“Plädoyer für eine Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus," Merkur 39:5 [May 1985], pp. 373–85), the Israeli historian Saul Friedländer warned that tracing continuities and perceiving normalities amidst the criminal acts risked banalizing the Nazi regime. Both articles, and further illuminating interchanges, are reprinted in Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past (see previous note).

/>   65. “Fascism is a genus of political ideology. . . ." (Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism [London: Routledge, 1991], p. 26). Behind fascism “lay a coherent body of thought" (Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History [London: Penguin, 1996], p. xvii).

  66. E. g., Schnapp, Primer, p. 63.

  67. A useful introduction to the evolving meanings of ideology, a term created during the French Revolution, is Andrew Vincent, Modern Political Ideologies, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

  68. Payne, History, p. 472.

  69. Hitler’s Mein Kampf (“My Struggle") served as Nazism’s basic text. Elegantly bound copies were presented to newlyweds and displayed in Nazi households. It is a powerful and consistent but turgid and self-indulgent collection of autobiographical fragments and personal reflections about race, history, and human nature. For Mussolini’s doctrinal writing, see chapter 1, p. 17 and note 76 below.

  70. A. Bertelè, Aspetti ideologici del fascismo (Turin, 1930) quoted in Emilio Gentile, “Alcuni considerazioni sull’ideologia del fascismo," Storia contemporanea 5:1 (March 1974), p. 117. I thank Carlo Moos for help in translating this difficult passage.

  71. Isaiah Berlin linked fascism and romanticism explicitly in “The Essence of European Romanticism," in Henry Hardy, ed., The Power of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 204.

  72. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," first published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5:1 (1936), reprinted in Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969). See especially pp. 241–42, where Benjamin quotes Marinetti on the beauty of the just-completed Ethiopian War: “. . . [war] enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. . . ."

  73. Delzell, Mediterranean Fascism, p. 14.

  74. Quoted in R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectivesin the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), p. 39.

  75. Emilio Gentile, Storia del partito fascista 1919–1922: Movimento e milizia (Bari: Laterza, 1989), p. 498.

  76. “La dottrina del fascismo," Enciclopedia italiana (1932), vol. XIV, pp. 847–51. An English version was given wide dissemination: Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism (Florence: Vallecchi, 1935, and later editions). A recent English version is in Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ed., Primer, pp. 46–61.

  77. Arendt, Origins, p. 325, n. 39. Cf. Salvatore Lupo, Il fascismo: La politica in un regime totalitario (Rome: Donzelli, 2000): “What determined the Fascist compound was more the hard facts of current politics than the incoherent magma of past ideology" (p. 18).

  78. Max Domarus, Hitler Speeches and Proclamations, 1932–1945 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), vol. I, p. 246 (February 10, 1933).

  79. Leszek Kolakowski perceived with exemplary clarity the way a closed, totalizing ideology serves to stifle critical questions in “Why an Ideology Is Always Right," in Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

  80. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, translated from the French by Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 2.

  81. This combination may surprise, but the brutality of Mussolini’s African campaigns, underlined by recent scholarship, needs to be seen as central to his regime. Mussolini used camps and ethnic cleansing, like Hitler, and he used poison gas, which Hitler never dared do. See chapter 6, pp. 165–66, and notes 63 and 68.

  82. “The fascist conception of life . . . affirms the value of the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the state." Mussolini, “Doctrine," in Schnapp, Primer, p. 48.

  83. Michael A. Ledeen, Universal Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1972).

  84. Marc Bloch, “Towards a Comparative History of European Society," in Bloch, Land and Work in Medieval Europe: Selected Papers, trans. J. E. Anderson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 58 (orig. pub. 1928).

  85. See note 29. Several important scholars, notably Sternhell and Bracher, believe that “a general theory that seeks to combine fascism and Nazism . . . is not possible" (Sternhell, Birth, p. 5). Their principal reason is the centrality of biological racism to National Socialism and its weakness in Fascism. This book argues that all fascisms mobilize against some enemy, internal as well as external, but that the national culture provides the identity of that enemy.

  86. The most impressively erudite survey is Payne, History.

  87. Griffith, Nature, p. 26.

  88. “The fascist state is not a night watchman. . . . [It] is a spiritual and moral entity whose purpose is that of securing the political, juridical, and economic organization of the nation. . . . Transcending the individual’s brief existence, the state stands for the immanent conscience of the nation." Mussolini, “Doctrine," in Schnapp, Primer, 58.

  89. An articulate example was Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen, whose Diary of a Man in Despair, trans. from the German by Paul Rubens (London: Macmillan, 1970) (orig. pub. 1947), laments the transformation of Germany since Bismarck into an “industrially overdeveloped ant-heap" (p. 119). Reck-Malleczewen reserved his sharpest invective for Hitler: “forelocked gypsy" (p. 18), “raw-vegetable Genghis Khan, teetotalling Alexander, womanless Napoleon" (p. 27). The Nazis executed him in early 1945. See also the journal of the pacifist arts patron Harry Kessler, The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971).

  90. Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Pantheon, 1950), p. 40.

  Chapter 2: Creating Fascist Movements

  1. Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1974), p. 148.

  2. For further reading on this and other countries discussed in this chapter, see the bibliographical essay.

  3. See chapter 2, p. 47.

  4. Brigitta Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship, trans. from the German by Thomas Thornton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) (orig. pub. 1996), is the most detailed treatment. William A. Jenks, Vienna and the Young Hitler (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), evokes the setting.

  5. The swastika, a symbol based on the sun that represented energy or eternity, among other things, was widely used in early Middle Eastern, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Amerindian cultures. Introduced into Europe in the late nineteenth century by spiritualists and mediums such as the celebrated Madame Blavatsky and by apostles of Nordic religion such as the Austrian Guido von List, it was first used in 1899 to express German nationalism and anti-Semitism in the New Templars Order of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–1954). The graphic artist Steven Heller explores its wide-ranging uses in The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? (New York: All-worth, 2001), and its links to Nazism are traced by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

  6. William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a SingleTown, 1922–1945, rev. ed. (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984), p. 32. Spannaus had already become a fan of the Nazi precursor Houston Stewart Chamberlain while living abroad.

  7. For the Freikorps see Robert G. L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954).

  8. Adolf Hitler, an Austrian citizen, moved to Munich in May 1913 to escape Austrian military service. When World War I began, he volunteered in the German army. For Hitler, Germanness was always more important than loyalty to any particular state; he became a German citizen only in 1932 (Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris [New York: Norton, 1998], p. 362). Hitler found his first personal fulfillment as a soldier. He faced danger as a message runner, was promoted to corporal, and was decorated for bravery with the Iron Cross, Second Class and then First Class, the highest possible award for an enlisted man (pp. 92, 96, 216).

  9. It was Röhm’s commanding officer, Freihe
rr Ritter von Epp, who later, at the end of 1920, put up half the money from army secret funds to buy the party a newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, the other half being assembled by the Munich journalist and bon vivant Dietrich Eckhart. Kershaw, Hitler, vol. I, p. 156.

  10. Hitler adopted the title “Führer,” along with the greeting “Heil,” from the pan-German leader Georg von Schönerer, so influential in pre-war Vienna. Kershaw, Hitler, vol. I, p. 34.

  11. See chapter 3, pp. 68–73.

  12. Juan J. Linz in “Political Space and Fascism as a Latecomer," in Stein U. Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust, Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1980), pp. 153–89, and “Some Notes Toward a Comparative Study of Fascism in Sociological Historical Perspective," in Walter Laqueur, ed., Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 3–121.

  13. Those whose adolescence was marked by the war but who missed actual combat because of youth or physical inaptitude could make particularly fanatical fascists. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, had missed the war because of his clubfoot. Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels, trans. from the German by Krishna Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1990), pp. 14, 24.

  14. Charles F. Delzell, ed., Mediterranean Fascism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 10.

  15. For example, François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communismin the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 19, 163, 168. Linz observes in “Political Space," pp. 158–59, that countries neutral in World War I had low levels of fascism, as did most victorious countries. Spain had endured defeat in 1898, however.

  16. Elie Halévy, L’Ere des tyrannies (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), translated into English as The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on Socialism and War, trans. Robert K. Webb (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965), first noted modern states’ discovery during World War I of their potential for controlling life and thought.