The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  70. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975).

  71. Kevin Passmore, From Liberalism to Fascism: The Right in a French Province, 1928–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 120, 152. This book relates fascist growth in France directly to the inefficacy of French conservative parties, whose rank and file rebelled against the old leadership and went over to the new antiparliamentary “ligues" in the 1930s. Kérillis was one of the rare French nationalist conservatives to resist that trend; he rejected Vichy and took refuge in New York in 1940.

  72. The plebiscite, the Roman republic’s term for a decision taken by popular vote, was introduced into modern political life by the French Revolution. An appeal to the entire public was proposed, but not used, when Louis XVI was tried and executed in 1792, and this kind of vote appears in the stillborn Constitution of 1793. General Napoleon Bonaparte gave it its modern form in 1800 by asking the whole male population to vote yes or no on his assumption of dictatorial powers as first consul. The plebiscite contrasts with the classical liberal preference of a vote by a minority of educated men for representatives who will share power with the ruler. Napoleon used it again to legitimate his assumption of the title of Emperor Napoleon I, as did his nephew Napoleon III. Hitler and Mussolini adopted the Napoleonic plebiscite unchanged.

  73. See views of Jürgen Kocha, opposed by Geoff Ely, in the bibliographical essay, p. 225. See also the theories of “noncontemporaneity" discussed in chapter 8, p. 209.

  74. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: Norton, 1957) (orig. pub. 1932).

  75. R. J. B. Bosworth, Italy: The Least of the Great Powers: Italian Foreign Policy Before the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For the relation between Italian economic catching-up and politics, see Richard A. Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy, 1908–1915 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1975).

  76. Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981).

  77. Many provincial Germans were offended by the freedom that Weimar German cities offered foreigners, artistic rebels, and homosexuals. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), is the richest account of the overturn in German cultural life after 1919, and the backlash it produced.

  78. For the volunteer units around General Kornilov, see Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking, 1997), pp. 556–62.

  79. “History has moved along the line of least resistance. The revolutionary epoch has made its incursion through the least-barricaded gates." Leon Trotsky, “Reflections on the Course of the Proletarian Revolution" (1919), quoted in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (New York: Vintage, 1965), p. 455.

  80. See chapter 1, note 30, for such works on Germany. The theory that the course of German history was a “special path," or Sonderweg, that embodied a particular propensity for fascism has lately been sharply criticized. For a recent review, see Shelley Baranowski, “East Elbian Landed Elites and Germany’s turn to Fascism: The Sonderweg Controversy Revisited," European History Quarterly 26:2 (1996), pp. 209–40.

  81. The Prelude, Book XI.

  82. In prison, awaiting execution (February 1945), Brasillach wrote nostalgically of “the magnificant radiance of the universal fascism of my youth . . . this exaltation of millions of men, cathedrals of light, heros struck down in combat, the friendship among the young people of the awakened nations." René Rémond, Les droites en France (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982), pp. 458–59.

  83. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence, 1929–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  84. It was the attempt by Ernst Nolte in June 1986 to revive this very idea, that the violence of Soviet communism (the “Asiatic deed") was the initial provocation to which Nazi violence was only a response, that ignited the furious “historians’ controversy" in Germany. See Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 29–30, and Peter Baldwin, Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).

  85. This question has been most carefully examined for the Nazi case by Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Cf. p. 262: “[T]he ordinary German population . . . did not perceive the Gestapo . . . as terribly threatening to them personally." See also Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  86. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 383. The Potempa murderers were released as soon as Hitler took office. See Paul Kluke, “Der Fall Potempa," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 5 (1957), pp. 279–97, and Richard Bessel, “The Potempa Murder," Central European History 10 (1977), pp. 241–54.

  87. Denise Detragiache, “Il fascismo feminile da San Sepolcro all’affare Matteotti (1919–1925)," Storia contemporanea 14:2 (April 1983), pp. 211–50. According to Julie V. Gottlieb, Feminist Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923–1945 (London: Tauris, 2001), 10 percent of candidates for the British Union of Fascists were women, and British fascist women stewards particularly relished beating up Communist women.

  88. Trasformismo (the word was first used by Prime Minister Depretis in 1876) was the political domestication of antisystem parties by bringing them into the system. Applied to the socialists by Giolitti, trasformismo split the reformist parliamentary socialists from the intransigents, such as the revolutionary syndicalists (like the young Mussolini). Having succeeded with the socialists, Giolitti was tempted to try trasformismo on the Fascists.

  Chapter 4: Getting Power

  1. While some fascist writers claim that fifty to seventy thousand Blackshirts were converging on Rome on October 28, and while King Victor Emanuel III later mentioned a figure of one hundred thousand to justify his reluctance to block the march, careful estimates suggest that only about nine thousand Blackshirts were actually in place at the gates of Rome on the morning of October 28. General Emanuele Pugliese, in command of the 16th Infantry Division based in Rome, had available ninety-five hundred seasoned infantrymen, three hundred cavalrymen, plus about eleven thousand police. He had the further advantages of well-fed and well-armed forces and inner lines of communication and defense. Antonino Répaci, La Marcia su Roma, new ed. (Milan: Rizzoli, 1972), pp. 441, 461–64.

  2. Martin Broszat in Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Der italienische Faschismus: Probleme und Forschungstendenzen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983), pp. 8–9. There is a well-informed brief account in English in Christopher Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism (London: Methuen, 1967), pp. 617–29.

  3. This parade is the subject of many photographs purporting to show the “March on Rome." See chapter 4, p. 109 for the incidents.

  4. The year V of the Fascist era thus began on October 28, 1927. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 90–98.

  5. Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 80, 109, 111–12, 150; this exhibition was repeated in 1942 for the twentieth anniversary (p. 197). See also Roberta Sazzivalli, “The Myth of Squadrismo in the Fascist Regime," Journal of Contemporary History35:2 (April 2000), pp. 131–50.

  6. European restabilization after World War I has been most lucidly examined by Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

  7. Harold J. Gordon, Jr., Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

  8. It was while serving the ensuing year
in Landsberg Prison that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (“My Struggle") and began creating his own mythical image.

  9. “We want to take power legally. But what we once do with this power when we have it, that’s our business." Goering, in the Reichstag, February 5, 1931, quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1883–1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 704, n. 201. Hitler threatened during a trial in Leipzig on September 25, 1930, that once in power he would “let . . . heads roll." Max Domarus, Hitler’s Speeches and Proclamations, 1932–1945 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), p. 244.

  10. The average was only eight and a half months. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Gerhard Schulz, and Wolfgang Sauer, Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung (Frankfurt am Mein/Berlin/Vienna: Ullstein, 1962), vol. I, p. 32.

  11. While the Nazis and the communists were the youngest parties in 1932, the SPD had the oldest leadership. Richard N. Hunt, German Social Democracy, 1918–1933 (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 71–72, 86, 89–91, 246.

  12. Erich Mathias and Rudolf Morsey, eds., Das Ende der Parteien (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1960), is still authoritative for the reactions of the political parties to Hitler’s arrival in power. In English, Donna Harsch, German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

  13. Conan Fischer, The German Communists and the Rise of Nazism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). See p. 177 for the transport strike.

  14. Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, p. 368.

  15. Emilio Gentile, Storia del partito fascista, 1919–1922: Movimento e milizia (Bari: Laterza, 1989), p. 202.

  16. Jens Petersen estimates that about ten thousand were killed and one hundred thousand injured in all forms of civil conflict in Italy in the early 1920s. Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Der italienische Faschismus, p. 32. Adrian Lyttelton estimates that five to six hundred persons died in Italy from Fascist violence in 1921 alone. See Lyttelton, “Fascism and Violence in Post-War Italy: Political Strategy and Social Conflict," in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld, eds., Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe (London: Macmillan with Berg Publishers for the German Historical Institute, 1982), p. 262; see also Jens Petersen, “Violence in Italian Fascism, 1919–1925," pp. 275–99 (esp. pp. 286–94).

  17. The latest and most convincing account of the choices, in no way inevitable, by which Hitler was made chancellor is Henry A. Turner, Jr., Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1996).

  18. Bullock, Hitler, pp. 253, 277.

  19. Bracher et al., Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung, p. 93.

  20. Luigi Salvatorelli and Giovanni Mira, Storia d’Italia nel periodo Fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), pp. 137–38. The subsequent election of April 6, 1924, with the Fascists in power, was not run under normal procedures, as we will see.

  21. Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 , 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), is still the most illuminating analysis. The phrase appears also in the title of the classic work of Bracher et al., Die nationalsozialistischeMachtergreifung.

  22. Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), considers that authoritarian regimes “served more as a barrier against, rather than an inducement for, fascism" (p. 312), which “paradoxically . . . required political freedom to have a chance to win power" (p. 252). See also pp. 250, 326, 395–6, 492.

  23. Works concerning this and other movements discussed in this chapter are listed, and often commented upon, in the bibliographical essay.

  24. Payne, History, p. 395.

  25. A thin veneer of fascist trappings included Antonescu’s title of “conducator,” leader.

  26. Not long before, a general strike by German labor unions had frustrated the Kapp Putsch in 1920.

  27. The most celebrated example was Cesari Mori, the strict and ascetic prefect of Bologna who tolerated disorder from neither socialists nor Fascists. Given emergency powers over the whole troubled Po Valley in November 1921, Mori tried to impose order, but his own police fraternized with the Fascists and he was transferred and then dismissed. Later Mussolini sent him to Sicily to repress the Mafia. Christopher Duggan, Fascism and the Mafia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 122–24 and passim.

  28. Juan J. Linz, “Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration," in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 66, 70, 78.

  29. William A. Renzi, “Mussolini’s Sources of Financial Support, 1914–1915," History 56:187 (June 1971), pp. 186–206.

  30. Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Der italienische Faschismus, p. 62. Cf. the comparable term “compromesso autoritario” for Mussolini’s choices in the important article of the late Massimo Legnani, “Systema di potere fascista, blocco dominante, alleanze sociali," in Angelo Del Boca et al., Il regime fascista, pp. 418–26.

  31. Chapter 2, p. 48.

  32. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, second enlarged edition (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), p. 375.

  33. Henry A. Turner, Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 95–99, 113–15, 133–42, 188, 245, 279–81, 287, shows that most businessmen’s worries about Nazi economic radicalism increased in 1932.

  34. Federico Chabod, A History of Italian Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975), p. 43 (orig. pub. 1950). “Fear can also be retrospective."

  35. The KPD was the only German party whose vote grew without interruption from December 1924 (9 percent) to November 1932 (17 percent), by which time the SPD vote had dropped from a peak of about 30 percent in 1928 to about 21 percent.

  36. Roberto Vivarelli, in Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Der italienischeFaschismus, p. 49. Vivarelli pondered these two processes at greater length in Il fallimento del Liberalismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981). The relationship between Fascism and Liberal Italy is reviewed most recently by Paul Corner, “The Road to Fascism: An Italian Sonderweg?" Contemporary European History 2:2 (2002), pp. 273–95.

  37. The Hitler cabinet of January 30, 1933, contained only two other Nazis: Economics Minister Walter Funk and Interior Minister Hermann Goering (a vital post, since it controlled the police; Goering was also minister-president of the largest state in Germany, Prussia). Mussolini’s cabinet of October 30, 1922, contained only three other Fascists, alongside seven ministers from other parties (one Liberal, one Nationalist, three Democrats, and two Popolari [Christian Democrats], two military men, and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile). Mussolini, in personal charge of the vital Ministries of the Interior and Foreign Affairs, had more power within his government at the beginning than Hitler. See Lyttelton, Seizure, 96, 457.

  38. Fritz Tobias, Der Reichstagsbrand: Legende und Wirklichkeit (Rastatt-Baden: Grote, 1962), and Hans Mommsen, “The Reichstag Fire and Its Political Consequences," in Hajo Holborn, ed., Republic to Reich: The Making of the Nazi Revolution(New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 129–222, and in Henry A. Turner, Jr., Nazism and the Third Reich (New York: Franklin Watts, 1972), pp. 109–50 (orig. pub., 1964).

  39. Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, trans. from the German by Oliver Pretzel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), gives a chilling description of such scenes as witnessed by a young magistrate who later emigrated.

  40. A professor of French in Dresden, Victor Klemperer, took regular notes of the degradation of Nazi language and called it LTI, Lingua tertii imperii, “language of the Third Empire," the inflated but empty grandiloquence beloved of Nazi propagandists and no longer specific to fascism: Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua tertii imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook (New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone, 2000). Klemperer is best known for his moving diary of enduring in Germany as a Jew married to a non-Jewish woman.

  41. The official death toll was eighty-five, fifty of them SA members, but no exact accounting will e
ver be possible. Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, p. 517.

  42. See chapter 6, p. 151.

  43. Adrian Lyttelton, “Fascism: The Second Wave," in Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse, eds., International Fascism: 1920–1945 (New York: Harper, 1966), pp. 75–100, reprinted from Journal of Contemporary History 1:1 (1966).

  44. Pierre Milza, Mussolini (Paris: Fayard, 1999), p. 307.

  45. Ibid., p. 331.

  46. They included Salandra, Giolitti, and the powerful Milan Corriere della Sera, but the Vatican and some industrialists warned that removing Mussolini would increase disorder. Seton-Watson, Italy, pp. 653–57.

  47. They called this fruitless gesture the “Aventine Secession," in reference to representatives of the Roman plebs who took refuge from patrician oppression on the Aventine Hill in 494 B.C. Divided among Socialists, Popolari, and some liberals, they appealed for a return to legality but could not agree on any action.

  48. See chapter 4, p. 97.

  49. See chapter 7, p. 193.

  50. An interesting proposal to create an additional category, midway between conservatism and fascism, of conservative regimes that crush grassroots fascist movements but borrow some of their devices, is Gregory J. Kasza, “Fascism from Above? Japan’s Kakushin Right in Comparative Perspective," in Stein Ugelvik Larsen, ed., Fascism Outside Europe (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2001), pp. 183–232. See also note 22 above.

  51. “I am fully opposed to any attempt to export National Socialism." Hitler’s Table Talk, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), p. 490 (entry for May 20, 1942).

  52. Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 267, 325.

  53. Approximately twenty-five hundred Belgian men served with Degrelle’s Légion Wallonie in Russia in 1943 and 1944; about eleven hundred of the two thousand sent to the front in November 1943 died, including its commander, Lucien Lippert. Martin Conway, Collaboration in Belgium: Léon Degrelle and the Rexist Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 220, 244.