The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  71. Lothar Gruchmann, Justiz im Dritten Reich: Anpassung und Unterwerfung in der Ära Gürtner, 2nd ed. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990).

  72. Guido Neppi Modona, “La magistratura e il fascismo," in Guido Quazza, ed., Fascismo e società italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), pp. 125–81.

  73. Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), shows that the Nazi antitobacco campaign could draw upon both Germany’s world-class medical research and Hitler’s personal hypochondria and dietary crankiness (a vegetarian, he referred to beef broth as “corpse tea").

  74. The phrase “medicalized killing" is in Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 14. See also Michael Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

  75. Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 204–20 (quotation on p. 211).

  76. Gellately, Backing Hitler, pp. vii, 51–67, 75, 80–83, 263.

  77. See chapter 6, note 77.

  78. See chapter 4, note 16.

  79. The classic account of this experience is Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963).

  80. Between 1926 and 1943, the Tribunale Speciale per la Difesa Dello Stato investigated twenty-one thousand cases and sentenced about ten thousand persons to some form of prison sentence (Jens Petersen, Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Der italienische Faschismus, p. 32). Death sentence figures, mostly involving separatist Croats and Slovenes, are from Petersen, confirmed by Guido Melis in Raffaele Romanelli, ed., Storia dello stato italiano dall’unità a oggi (Rome: Donzelli, 1995), p. 390. Italy had more than fifty prison camps in 1940–43, however, of which the largest was Ferramonti di Tarsia in Calabria. See Bosworth, Dictatorship, p. 1, and J. Walston, “History and Memory of the Italian Concentration Camp," Historical Journal 40 (1997), pp. 169–83.

  81. Paolo Ungari, Alfredo Rocco e l’ideologia giuridica del fascismo (Brescia: Morcelliano, 1963), p. 64. Rocco, a Nationalist fellow traveler, already took this position before 1914 as a young law professor.

  82. Although Hitler refrained from using lethal gas in warfare, Mussolini used it against Libyans and Ethiopians. See Angelo Del Boca, I Gas di Mussolini: Il fascismo e la guerra d’Etiopia (Rome: Editore Riuniti, 1996). Mussolini also herded Senussi tribesmen in Libya into concentration camps. For other works on the Italian colonial empire, see the bibliographical essay.

  83. Johnson, Nazi Terror, pp. 46–47, and 503–04. Cologne, with three quarters of a million citizens (not counting an additional population of foreign workers) had sixty-nine Gestapo officers in 1942. For the important role played in Nazi enforcement by voluntary denunciations, see the bibliographical essay, pp. 230–31.

  84. Tim Mason, “The Containment of the Working Class," in Jane Caplan, ed., Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Class: Essays by Tim Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 238.

  85. Giulio Sapelli, ed., La classe operaia durante il fascismo (Milan: Annali della fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 20th year, 1979–80), makes this point for Italy.

  86. See the bibliographical essay.

  87. Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000), pp. 257ff. Haffner escaped to England in 1937 and wrote this memoir a year later.

  88. This was not the general opinion in Italy during the first twenty years after the liberation, when a somewhat inflated view of the Italian resistance prevailed. When Renzo De Felice argued for consensus in Mussolini il Duce, vol. I: Gli anni del consenso(Turin: Einaudi, 1974), he aroused violent controversy. The mechanisms were worked out by Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbricca del consenso: Fascismo e mass media (Bari: Laterza, 1975), and the results verified by Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani.For the latest synthesis, see Patrizia Dogliani, Italia fascista 1922–1940 (Milan: Sansoni/RCS, 1999), chap. 3, “L’organizzazione del consenso."

  89. Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 62.

  90. This vote was more nearly a plebiscite than an election: the citizens could vote only “Yes" or “No" to the entire list. Even so, 89.63 percent of those eligible participated, and only 136,198 of them (2 percent) voted “No."

  91. See the works of MacGregor Knox discussed in the bibliographical essay, p. 238.

  92. Marlis Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1977).

  93. The German film Die Kinder aus Nr. 67 (The Children of No. 67) (1980) shows subtly how the boys and girls of a working-class apartment building in Berlin adapted to the newly obligatory Hitler Youth in spring 1933 under the multiple influences of attraction, peer pressure, parental values, and coercion.

  94. Melitta Maschmann’s memoir Account Rendered (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1965) is eloquent on this point.

  95. One German youth admitted, “It’s really nice being able to lash out, without being hit back." Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), p. 237. Jean-Paul Sartre’s short fictional essay “L’enfance d’un chef" plausibly evokes an adolescent bully’s journey to fascism.

  96. For the immense literature on this and other debates about women under fascism, see the bibliographical essay, pp. 233–34.

  97. The grinning young woman in a fascist uniform with her cigarette on the dust jacket of Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), displays these ambiguities perfectly.

  98. M. Carli, Fascismo intransigente: Contributo alla fondazione di un regime (Florence: R. Bemporad e Figlio, 1926), p. 46, quoted in Norberto Bobbio, “La Cultura e il fascismo," in Guido Quazza, ed., Fascismo e società italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), p. 240, n. 1.

  99. Ibid., p. 240.

  100. E.g., the doctor and painter Carlo Levi, whose Christ Stopped at Eboli, written during “confinement" in a southern hill town, is one of the masterpieces of modern Italian literature.

  101. E.g., the Rosselli brothers, Giovanni Amendola, and Piero Gobetti.

  102. See chapter 2, note 105.

  103. Sandrine Bertaux, “Démographie, statistique, et fascisme: Corrado Gini et l’ISTAT, entre Science et Idéologie," Roma Moderna et Contemporanea 7:3 (September-December 1999), p. 571–98.

  104. Gabriele Turi, Il fascismo e il consenso degli intellettuali (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980), pp. 59, 63. Radical fascists protested their presence.

  105. Bobbio, “La Cultura," p. 112. Three of these also contributed to the Enciclopedia(Turi, Il fascismo, p. 63).

  106. Monika Renneburg and Mark Walker, eds., Science, Technology, and National Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  107. John L. Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman for German Science (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).

  108. Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradical izationof German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

  109. Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) argued that complex modern societies required a “total state" capable of efficacious decision-making. A good start in an extensive literature is Richard Wolin, “Carl Schmitt, Political Existentialism, and the Total State," in Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism,Poststructuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 83–104.

  110. Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 1939–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), argues the latter case persuasively; Thomas Powers, Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (New York: Knopf, 1993), is more sympathetic to Heisenberg’s claims of foot dragging.

  111. One of the “Ten Principles of German Music" enunciated when Goebbels established the Reichsmusikkammer on November 15, 1933. Furtwängler rejected, however, the further principles that Judaism
and atonalism were incompatible with German music.

  112. See Robert Craft, “The Furtwängler Enigma," New York Review of Books 40:16 (October 7, 1993), pp. 10–14.

  113. See chapter 1, p. 10.

  114. See chapter 1, note 53.

  115. See Gellately, Backing Hitler, on “police justice" (pp. 5, 34–50, 82, 175, 258).

  116. The Fascist Party’s youth organizations spread nationwide after 1926, when they were united under the Ministry of Education in the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB, named after a youth who had died resisting Napoleon). The ONB enrolled boys and girls (separately and less completely) from eight to eighteen; they could start at six as “Wolf Cubs." The ONB was reorganized under Fascist Party control in 1937 as the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio (GIL; the littorio, or lictor, was the official who carried the fasces before the magistrates in civic processions under the Roman Empire). The GIL was increasingly militarized (for boys) under the motto “Believe, Obey, Fight," and after 1939 it was obligatory. University students belonged to the Gruppi Universitaria Fascista. See the bibliographical essay for relevant works.

  117. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 2: State, Economy, and Society, 1933–1939: A Documentary Reader (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1984), doc. #297, p. 417.

  118. Karl-Heinz Jahnke and Michael Buddrus, Deutsche Jugend 1933–1945: Eine Dokumentation (Hamburg: VSA-Verlag, 1989), p. 15.

  119. Quoted in Arendt, Origins, p. 339. She believed him. 120. Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).

  121. Here is where Rousseau and his fear of faction becomes a possible remote precursor of fascism.

  122. See the bibliographical essay, p. 236. 123. Glenn R. Cuomo, ed., National Socialist Cultural Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 107.

  124. Alan E. Steinweis, “The Purge of Artistic Life," in Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus, eds., Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 108–09.

  125. The most illuminating general discussion is Charles S. Maier, “The Economics of Fascism and Nazism," in Maier, In Search of Stability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

  126. T. W. Mason, “The Primacy of Politics: Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany," in Caplan, ed., Nazism.

  127. Sergio Romano, Giuseppi Volpi et l’Italie moderne: Finance, industrie et Etat de l’ère giolittienne à la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (Rome: École française de Rome, 1982), pp. 141–52; Jon S. Cohen, “The 1927 Revaluation of the Lira: A Study in Political Economy," Economic History Review 25 (1972), pp. 642, 654.

  128. Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: I. G. Farben in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 120.

  129. This evolution is analyzed masterfully by Hayes, Industry and Ideology.

  130. Gerhard Th. Mollin, Montankonzerne und Drittes Reich: Der Gegensatz zwischen Monopolindustrie und Befehlwirtschaft in der deutschen Rüstung und

  Expansion 1936–1944 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1988), pp. 70ff, 102ff, and 198ff.

  131. Gerald D. Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For the camps, see pp. 409–15. Otto Wagener is quoted from his diary, Hitler aus Nächste Nähe, ed. Henry A. Turner, Jr. (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1978), pp. 373–74. The faithful Wagener never ceased to believe, even after 1945, that Hitler’s true “national socialist" ideals had been sabotaged by reactionary Nazisten around him (p. xi). For Wagener’s distaste for “filthy money," see chapter 1, p. 10.

  132. John S. Cohen, “Was Italian Fascism a Developmental Dictatorship?" EconomicHistory Review, 2nd series, 41:1 (February 1988), pp. 95–113, compares Italian growth rates. For more on the “developmental dictatorship" interpretation of fascism, see chapter 1, note 49, and chapter 8, p. 210.

  Chapter 6: The Long Term: Radicalization or Entropy?

  1. Adrian Lyttelton, in Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Der italienischeFaschismus: Probleme und Forschungstendenzen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983), p. 59.

  2. Giuseppe Bottai, “La rivoluzione permanente," in Critica fascista, November 1, 1926, quoted in Alexander Nützenadel, “Faschismus als Revolution? Politische Sprache und revolutionärer Stil im Italien Mussolinis," in Christof Dipper, Lutz Klinkhammer, and Alexander Nützenadel, eds., Europäische Sozialgeschichte: Festschriftfür Wolfgang Schieder (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000), p. 37. The words recall Trotsky, but Bottai, a former squadrist turned bureaucrat, explained that Fascist “permanent revolution," unlike earlier revolutions, meant long-term change under state direction. Jeremy Noakes surveys this issue elegantly for Germany in “Nazism and Revolution," in Noel O’Sullivan, ed., Revolutionary Theory and Political Reality (London: Wheatsheaf, 1983), pp. 73–100. See also Arendt’s view in chapter 5, p. 124.

  3. This term is defined in chapter 8, pp. 216–18.

  4. For a brilliant interpretation of Franco’s Spain as fascist (at least until 1945) because of its murderous vengefulness, its quest for cultural purity, and its closed economic system, see Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  5. The latest and fullest biography is Paul Preston, Franco (New York: Basic Books, 1994) (quotation on p. 330). More than most biographers, Preston portrays Franco as actively committed to partnership with the Axis up to at least 1942.

  6. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 330.

  7. Preston, Franco, p. 267.

  8. Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), pp. 401, 451, and passim.

  9. Antonio Costa Pinto, Salazar’s Dictatorship and European Fascism (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1995), p. 161.

  10. Antonio Costa Pinto, The Blue Shirts: Portuguese Fascists and the New State (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2000).

  11. Costa Pinto, Salazar’s Dictatorship, p. 204.

  12. Roland Sarti, Fascism and the Industrial Leadership in Italy, 1919–1940: A Study in the Expansion of Private Power under Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 51.

  13. See chapter 4, pp. 109–10.

  14. See chapter 5, pp. 132–33. After ten years in the political wilderness, Farinacci returned to prominence in the Ethiopian War, where he distinguished himself by blowing off his own hand while fishing with grenades. He remained on terms of easy familiarity with the Duce, always urging greater radicalism, until he encountered German disapproval in 1943.

  15. Roland Sarti subtitles his book (note 12 above) “A Study in the Expansion of Private Power Under Fascism." A recent overview of Fascist syndicalism is Adolfo Pepe, “Il sindacato fascista," in Angelo Del Boca Massimo Legnani, and Mario D. Rossi, Il regime fascista: Storia e storiografia (Bari: Laterza, 1995), pp. 220–43.

  16. See chapter 5, p. 138.

  17. Pius XI had already accepted the dissolution of the troublesome Partito Popolare of Dom Luigi Sturzo in 1926. He negotiated a series of concordats with European dictatorships, including Nazi Germany, by which he accepted the dissolution of Catholic parties in return for the continued existence of Catholic Action and parochial schools.

  18. Works on Italian church-state relations are in the bibliographical essay.

  19. Quoted in Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), p. 13.

  20. See chapter 6, pp. 156, 164–69.

  21. See chapter 5, pp. 127–28.

  22. See chapter 6, p. 169.

  23. Schwerin von Krosigk remained in office until the very end, but with diminishing authority.

  24. Robert Koehl, “Feudal Aspects of National Socialism," American Political Science Review 54 (December 1960), pp. 921–33.

  25. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, Nazis
m 1919–1945, vol. 2: State, Economy and Society, 1933–1939: A Documentary Reader (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1984), pp. 231–32.

  26. See chapter 5, note 50.

  27. The Goebbels Diaries, ed. Louis Lochner (New York: Doubleday, 1948), p. 314 (entry for March 20, 1943). Hitler was speaking of the Jewish issue.

  28. A. J. P. Taylor, Origins of the Second World War (New York: Atheneum, 1962), pp. 210–12, 216–20, 249–50, 278.

  29. Galeazzo Ciano, Diary 1937–1943 (New York: Enigma, 2002), p. 25 (entry for November 13, 1937).

  30. Bruno Biancini, ed., Dizionario Mussoliniano (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1939), p. 88 (speech to parliament, May 26, 1934).

  31. Edward R. Tannenbaum gives a few examples in The Fascist Experience: ItalianSociety and Culture, 1922–1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1972), pp. 306, 329.

  32. The standard account, Macgregor Knox, Mussolini Unleashed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), attributes the decision solely to Mussolini’s bellicosity, though Bosworth, Mussolini, dissents, arguing that Mussolini was more cautious in 1939–40 than Liberal Italy in 1911 and 1915, and largely supported by Italian public opinion in his decision to go to war (p. 370).

  33. Robert O. Paxton, Parades and Politics at Vichy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 75–81, 228–37, 321–43.

  34. See chapter 8, p. 209.

  35. Firmly established a generation ago by Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), and Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im dritten Reich (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1972), the development by stages of Nazi anti-Jewish policy continues to inform the most important syntheses: Saul Freidländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I: The Years of Persecution: 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), and Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung (Munich: Piper, 1998).

  36. Hitler chose the “least inclusive" version offered him. Friedländer, Nazi Germanyand the Jews, vol. I, pp. 148–49.