The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  54. The only European fascist leader to fight in person on the eastern front was Jacques Doriot, who accompanied some six thousand other Frenchmen in the semiofficial Légion des Volontaires Contre le Bolshevisme. Philippe Burrin, La dérive fasciste:Doriot, Déat, Bergery: 1933–1945 (Paris: Seuil, 1986), p. 431.

  55. See chapter 4, p. 97.

  56. John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 440.

  57. Burrin, La Dérive fasciste, pp. 451–54, calls the French ultracollaborators like Déat and Doriot “secondary or derived" fascists because they lacked the urge for expansion by war common to Mussolini and Hitler.

  58. See chapter 3, pp. 68–73.

  59. Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  60. See chapter 4, p. 101.

  61. A penetrating account of the conservatives’ actions in Italy in 1920–22 in terms of the narrowing of alternatives is Paolo Farneti, “Social Conflict, Parliamentary Fragmentation, Institutional Shift, and the Rise of Fascism: Italy," in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 3–33.

  62. “These were the conditions that made Fascist victory possible," writes Adrian Lyttelton, “but they did not make it inevitable" (Seizure, p. 77). See also Turner,

  Hitler’s Thirty Days.

  Chapter 5: Exercising Power

  1. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), pp. 291, 396–97.

  2. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism, trans. from the German by Jean Steinberg (New York: Praeger, 1970) (orig. pub. 1969), p. 492.

  3. Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich, trans. from the German by John W. Hiden (London: Longman, 1981) (orig. pub. 1969), p. 57.

  4. Hans Mommsen, “Zur Verschränkung traditionellen und faschistischen Führungsgruppe in Deutschland beim Übergang von der Bewegungs zur System-phase," in Der Nationalsozialismus und die deutsche Gesellschaft, ed. Lutz Niethammer and Bernd Weisbrod for Mommsen’s sixtieth birthday (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991), pp. 39–66 (quotations from pp. 39, 40, 50).

  5. “Sulle origini del movimento fascista," Occidente 3 (1954), p. 306, reprinted in Opere di Gaetano Salvemini, vol. VI: Scritti sul fascismo, vol. III (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1974), p. 439. Salvemini here emphasized the multiple roots and successive stages of fascism.

  6. Alberto Aquarone, L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), pp. 271, 302. It was, said Curzio Malaparte with scorn, “a Liberal government administered by Fascists" (p. 247).

  7. Wolfgang Schieder, “Der Strukturwandel der faschistischen Partei Italiens in der Phase der Herrschaftsstabilisierung," in Schieder, ed., Faschismus als soziale Bewegung: Deutschland und Italien im Vergleich, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1983), esp. pp. 71, 90. These points are taken up again by Jens Petersen and Wolfgang Schieder in Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Der italienischeFascismus: Probleme und Forschungstendenzen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983).

  8. Massimo Legnani, “Sistema di potere fascista, blocco dominante, alleanze sociali: Contributo a una discussione," in Angelo Del Boca, Massimo Legnani, and Mario G. Rossi, eds., Il regime fascista: Storia e storiografia (Bari: Laterza, 1995), pp. 414–45 (quotation from p. 415).

  9. Emilio Gentile, La via italiana al totalitarismo: Il partito e lo stato nel regime fascista (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1995), pp. 83, 136, 180.

  10. A conclusion abetted by some cultural studies that examine the pageantry without weighing its influence. See a fuller discussion in chapter 8, pp. 214–15.

  11. Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State (New York: Oxford, 1941).

  12. The coexistence within the Nazi regime of legal punctiliousness with blatant lawlessness never ceases to astonish. As late as December 1938 some Jewish victims of individual, unauthorized Nazi violence were able to have their assailants arrested by the German police and punished by German courts at the very moment when authorized violence against Jews was mounting. As one survivor recalled years later, “unofficial crimes were forbidden in the Third Reich." Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 124–25.

  13. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 253.

  14. The persistence in Nazi Germany of a “normative state" should never be construed as exonerating all its officials, who, in practice (and especially after war began), could act as cruelly and as arbitrarily as the “parallel" agencies. See, for example, Nikolaus Wachsmann, “ ‘Annihilation through Labour’: The Killing of State Prisoners in the Third Reich," Journal of Modern History 71 (September 1999), pp. 627–28, 659. Many examples are offered as well in Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The old self-exculpatory distinction between the “correct" professional army and the criminal SS has also been undermined by Omer Bartov in works cited in chapter 6, note 79.

  15. On the usefulness of national emergency for dictators, see Hans Mommsen, “Ausnahmezustand als Herrschaftstechnik des NS-Regimes," in Manfred Funke, ed., Hitler, Deutschland und die Mächte (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1976).

  16. Emilio Gentile, “The Problem of the Party in Italian Fascism," Journal of Contemporary History 19:2 (April 1984), pp. 251–74.

  17. It remains uncertain what the initials stood for, if anything. For works on OVRA and the Fascist repressive agencies, see the bibliographical essay, p. 230.

  18. The Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, the state holding company set up to rescue failing banks and industries in January 1933. See Marco Maraffi, Politica

  ed economica in Italia: Le vicende dell’impresa pubblica dagli anni Trenta agli anni

  Cinquanta (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990).

  19. Gentile, La via italiano, p. 185: the “acceleration of the totalitarian process." Gentile does not use the “dual state" model, however.

  20. Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); for three “intelligent, well-meaning, reputable [Lutheran] theologians" whose nationalism reconciled them to the regime, see Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) (quotation on p. 198).

  21. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1965), chap. 6.

  22. For a vivid local example of how German Catholics rejected some specific Nazi practices that invaded parish “turf" without challenging the regime itself, see Jeremy Noakes, “The Oldenburg Crucifix Conflict," in Peter D. Stachura, The Shapingof the Nazi State (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 210–33.

  23. Martin Broszat borrowed the German medical term Resistenz to express a kind of negative impermeability to Nazi influence (as with the Churches, for example), not to be confused with the more active Widerstand, or positive opposition. For this distinction, see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), p. 151.

  24. Alf Lüdtke, in Herrschaft als sozialer Praxis, Veröffentlichen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte #91 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1991), pp. 12–14, draws “appropriation" from Max Weber, Marx, E. P. Thompson, and Pierre Bourdieu. I draw it from personal experience, having, at the age of thirteen, helped my comrades subvert a well-meant Boy Scout weekend camping program into something closer to Lord of the Flies.

  25. An important literature on the fascist regimes’ encouragement of denunciations, and their worry about false ones, appears in the bibliographical essay, p. 230.

  26. Geoffrey G. Gil
es, “The Rise of the NS Students’ Association," in Peter D. Stachura, ed., Shaping, pp. 160–85, and Students and National Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 168, 175–86, 201, 228. There is abundant detail in Helma Brunck, Die deutsche Burschenschaft in der Weimar Republik und im Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Universitas, 1999).

  27. See more in chapter 5, p. 138 and chapter 6, pp. 152–53.

  28. Tracy Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 248, gives examples from the war years. I thank Luciano Rebay for personal reminiscences on this point.

  29. See chapter 5, p. 124.

  30. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 353, n. 1, advocate, convincingly, a more anthropologically informed study of how fascist regimes interacted with social and professional groups.

  31. Hannah Arendt, Origins, pp. 389–90, 395, 398, 402. She credits “shapelessness" to Franz Neumann, Behemoth. Broszat revived the term in The Hitler State, p. 346. Salvatore Lupo, Il fascismo: La politica in un regime totalitario (Rome: Donzelli, 2000), points to Fascist Italy’s “frenzy of perpetual motion," citing Arendt (p. 30).

  32. This may explain the curious hesitation of the king and conservative and liberal political leaders to remove Mussolini from office after the murder of Matteotti in June 1924. See chapter 4, pp. 109–10.

  33. Jens Petersen goes so far as to speak of a de facto system of “checks and balances" in Fascist Italy. Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Der italienische Faschismus, p. 25. The Nazi system was more clearly dominated by Hitler and party activists, but see Edward N. Peterson, The Limits of Hitler’s Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

  34. Circular of January 5, 1927, quoted in Aquarone, L’organizzazione, pp. 485–88.

  35. See the illuminating work of Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

  36. Broszat, The Hitler State, pp. 218–19.

  37. Gentile, La via italiana, pp. 177, 179, 183.

  38. Martin Clark, Modern Italy, 1971–1982 (London: Longman, 1984), p. 237.

  39. Broszat, Hitler State, pp. 199–201.

  40. The literature on this controversial point is reviewed in the bibliographical essay, pp. 232–33.

  41. R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 31, 81, notes that no study similar to Peterson, Limits, analyzes decision-making in Fascist Italy and limits on Mussolini’s claims to total control.

  42. The term was invented by Max Weber, who distinguished among bureaucratic, patriarchal, and charismatic authority, the first two stable and based on economic rationality, in their different ways, and the third unstable and outside any formal structure or economic rationality. Charisma rests on a leader’s reputation for having extraordinary personal powers that must be constantly reaffirmed by results. Weber derived the term from the Greek word for the Christian concept of grace. See From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans., ed., and with an introduction by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 79–80, 235–52, 295–96.

  43. Italian Fascist Party officials actually discussed the constitutional issues involved in the Duce’s succession. They debated, for example, whether the title passed with the office or belonged personally to Mussolini. Gentile, La via italiana, pp. 214–16. Only Hitler could evoke his own succession. See Zitelmann, Selbstverständnis, pp. 393, 396.

  44. For the many American admirers of Mussolini in the 1920s, see John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). For British admirers such as George Bernard Shaw and former prime minister David Lloyd George, and many other Europeans, see Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il Duce, vol. I: Gli anni del consenso, 1929–1936 (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), pp. 541–87.

  45. See chapter 5, pp. 127–28.

  46. The best studies of public opinion in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are discussed in the bibliographical essay, pp. 235–36. Joseph Nyomarkay, Charisma and Factionalism in the Nazi Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), argued that charismatic rule prevented party factions from joining in an authentic opposition.

  47. Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Der italienische Faschismus, p. 59.

  48. The term was first used in 1969 by Broszat, Hitler State, p. 294, and more fully developed by Peter Hüttenberger, “Nationalsozialistische Polykratie," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2:4 (1976), pp. 417–72. See further Hans Mommsen in many works, including From Weimar to Auschwitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker, eds., Der Führerstaat: Mythos und Realität (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981). For interesting comparisons see Philippe Burrin, “Politique et société: Les structures du pouvoir dans l’Italie fasciste et l’Allemagne nazie," Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations, 43 (1988), pp. 615–37. For the applicability of this concept to Fascist Italy, the debate in Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Der italienische Faschismus, is enlightening, especially the remarks of Jens Petersen and Wolfgang Schieder.

  49. Hans Mommsen first used the term “weak dictator" in Beamtentum im DrittenReich (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1966), p. 98, n. 26. In extensive later writings on the Nazi system of rule (Herrschaftssystem), Mommsen made it clear that he considered that Hitler possessed power “unlimited" to a degree “rare in history" but exercised it in a chaotic way that deprived Nazi Germany of the main characteristics of a state, i.e., that capacity to examine options freely and choose among them rationally. See, for example, Mommsen in “Hitler’s Position in the Weimar System," From Weimar to Auschwitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 67, 75. For the progressive “Entstaatlichung” (loss of “state-ness") of the Nazi system, see Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung," in Lutz Niethammer and Bernd Weisbrod, eds., Der Nationalsozialismus und die deutsche Gesellschaft: Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991), p. 409.

  50. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 1999), chap. 13, “Working Toward the Fuhrer," pp. 527–91.

  51. Rundschau, the German-language publication of the Communist International, on April 12, 1933, quoted in Julius Braunthal, History of the International, 1914–1943 (New York: Praeger, 1967), vol. II, p. 394.

  52. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Sauer, and Gerhard Schulz, Die nationalsozialisticheMachtergreifung (Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutcher Verlag, 1960), p. 219.

  53. An excellent introduction to conservatives’ complex attitudes toward Hitler and their failure to control him is Jeremy Noakes, “German Conservatives and the Third Reich: An Ambiguous Relationship," in Martin Blinkhorn, ed., Fascists and Conservatives (London: Allen and Unwin, 1990), pp. 71–97.

  54. Albert Speer, just beginning his brilliant career as Hitler’s architect with an assignment to transform the vice-chancellor’s offices into SA headquarters, remembered averting his eyes from a large pool of dried blood on the floor of the office of Herbert von Bose, an assistant to von Papen. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. from the German by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 53.

  55. A recent review of this complex matter is Gerd P. Ueberschär, “General Halder and the Resistance to Hitler in the German High Command, 1938–1940," European History Quarterly 18:3 (July 1988), pp. 321–41.

  56. Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims, vol. II: The Establishment of the New Order (New York: Norton, 1974), pp. 60, 278. By such appointments Ribbentrop was defending his empire against both the diplomatic corps and the agents of his arch-rival Himmler.

  57. Arendt, for example (see chapter 8, note 34). Emilio Gentile, by contrast, insists in La via italiana al totalitarismo, pp. 67, 136, 180, 254, on the Fascist regime’s aspiration to
construct a fully totalitarian state, though even he recognizes that, in practice, it remained “incomplete." Totalitarianism is addressed in chapter 8.

  58. Adrian Lyttelton, Seizure, pp. 127, 273.

  59. “Radicals" cited by Clark, Modern Italy, p. 259. Clark considers this judgment accurate for the summit political institutions, but that much else in Fascist Italy was new.

  60. See chapter 3, p. 66.

  61. See chapter 3, p. 68, and chapter 4, p. 101.

  62. The seizure of art in conquered territories for the Nazi leaders and for German national museums gave the underemployed mystical prophet Alfred Rosenberg something to do after 1939. The rivalries and place-seeking around Rosenberg were a key example in the development of the “polycratic" interpretation of Nazi rule. See Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner: Zum Machtkampf im nationalsozialistichen Herrschaftssystem (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1979).

  63. See chapter 4, p. 110.

  64. Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista (1918–1925), 2nd ed. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), pp. 335–48 (“Farinacci e l’estremismo intransigente"). In English see Harry Fornari, Mussolini’s Gadfly: Roberto Farinacci (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971).

  65. See the bibliographical essay, p. 231.

  66. Hans Buchheim, “The SS—Instrument of Domination," in Helmut Krausnick, Hans Buchheim, Martin Broszat, and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, eds., Anatomy of the SS State, trans. from the German by Richard Barry, Marian Jackson, and Dorothy Long (New York: Walker, 1968), pp. 127–301, a study of the Nazi police system prepared for the trial of a group of guards at the Auschwitz extermination camp in 1963, remains the most authoritative account.

  67. Gellately, Backing Hitler, pp. 34–36, 87–89, 258.

  68. Ibid., p. 43.

  69. Ibid., p. 31.

  70. Only one of 122 judges belonging to various panels of the Supreme Court in Germany was a Social Democrat, and only two were members of the Nazi Party. Most were conservative nationalists. Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 37.