The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  37. See chapter 1, p. 14.

  38. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, Nazism: 1919–1945, vol. II: State, Economy, and Society, 1933–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1984), p. 559.

  39. Götz Aly, “Jewish Resettlement: Reflections on the Prehistory of the Holocaust," p. 64, and Thomas Sandkühler, “Anti-Jewish Policy and the Murder of the Jews in the District of Galicia, 1941–42," pp. 109–11, in Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies(New York: Fischer, 1998).

  40. The “homecoming" of ethnic Germans from the South Tyrol (or Alto Adige) and a number of eastern European areas, including the Baltic States, Bukovina, Dobrudja, and Bessarabia, had been negotiated with Mussolini and Stalin in 1939. The classic work is Robert L. Koehl, RKFDV: German Resettlement and Population Policy, 1939–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). See also Götz Aly, “Final Solution”: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, trans. from the German by Belinda Cooper and Allison Brown (London and New York: Arnold, 1999), esp. chap. 5. A useful synopsis is Aly, “Jewish Resettlement," in Ulrich Herbert, ed., Extermination Policies, pp. 53–82.

  41. Aly, “Jewish Resettlement," pp. 61, 69, 70, uses the terms “blind alley” and “domino policy." The authoritative work on the Madagascar plan is Magnus Brechtken, “Madagascar für die Juden”: Antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis, 1885–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997).

  42. See the important new work gathered in Herbert, ed., Extermination Policies.

  43. Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung, pp. 369–410; Christian Dieckmann, “The War and the Killing of the Lithuanian Jews," in Herbert, Extermination Policies, p. 231; Sandkühler, “Anti-Jewish Policy," pp. 112–13.

  44. David Irving’s suggestion in Hitler’s War (New York: Viking, 1977), pp. 12–13, that Himmler was responsible until 1943 has been discredited. Irving later became a negationist.

  45. Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), assembled overwhelming evidence on this point.

  46. Christopher R. Browning, “The Euphoria of Victory and the Final Solution: Summer-Fall 1941," German Studies Review 17 (1994), pp. 473–81.

  47. Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust (London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1994).

  48. Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord: Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998), chap. 2: “Die Wannsee Konferenz, das Schicksal der deutschen Juden, und Hitlers politische Grundsatzentscheidung alle Juden Europas zu ermorden."

  49. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany c. 1900– 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) (numbers on p. 160). The decision was actually taken in October 1939 and backdated to September 1, the date the war began. Taking into account local authorities’ later deliberate starvation of asylum inmates in Germany and the killing of the insane and incurable in occupied eastern Europe, the total reached about two hundred thousand by 1945.

  50. See Helmut Krausnick and H. H. Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges:Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938–1942 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981).

  51. Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml, and Hermann Weiss, eds., Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), p. 815.

  52. The phrase “intermediary solution" comes from Götz Aly, “Jewish resettlement," p. 69.

  53. Mathias Beer, “Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 35:3 (July 1987), pp. 403–18.

  54. The Nazis divided occupied Poland into three parts in 1939: the western third, officially relabeled the Warthegau, was incorporated into the Reich. The eastern third was occupied by Stalin. The leftover center, ruled as a Nazi Party fiefdom by Governor-General Hans Frank, did not even have a name in the Polish language. The Nazis called it by the vaguely French neologism “Generalgouvernement.”

  55. Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia: 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 2nd rev. ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981) (orig. pub. 1957), is still essential for the SS administration and exploitation of conquered Soviet territory.

  56. Aktion 1005 was a program to cover up the traces of closed killing centers in the eastern occupied areas, as at Chelmno in September 1944. The labor was mostly provided by the last camp inmates, who were shot when the work was done. At times, however, German soldiers, desperately needed at the front, did this work. Walter Manoschek, “The Extermination of Jews in Serbia" in Herbert, Extermination Policies,p. 181.

  57. Chilling examples are published in Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

  58. Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 364–72, 377–78; O. D. Kulka, “The German Population and the Jews," in David Bankier, ed., Probing the Depth of German Antisemitism (New York: Berghahn, 2000), p. 276, considers it “general knowledge."

  59. See Hans Buchheim’s pages on “hardness and camaraderie" in Helmut Krausnick, Hans Buchheim, Martin Broszat, and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Anatomy of the SS-State (New York: Walker, 1968), pp. 334–48.

  60. Speech of October 25, 1932; similar words occur in the “Fascism" entry in the Enciclopedia italiana.

  61. English excerpts from this speech are published in Charles F. Delzell, ed., Mediterranean Fascism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 199–200.

  62. Luigi Goglia and Fabio Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano da Adua all’impero (Bari: Laterza, 1993), p. 221.

  63. Goglia and Grassi, Colonialismo, pp. 222, 234. See also Nicola Labanca, “L’Amministrazione coloniale fascista: Stato, politica, e società," in Angelo Del Boca, et al., Il regime fascista, pp. 352–95.

  64. The terms are Renzo De Felice’s in Mussolini: Il Duce: Lo stato totalitario, 1936–1940 (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), p. 100; for controversies surrounding Mussolini’s principal biographer, see the bibliographical essay, p. 224.

  65. Gabriella Klein, La Politica linguistica del fascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986).

  66. The most recent and convincing accounts are by Michele Sarfatti: Mussolini contro gli ebrei: Cronaca delle leggi del 1938 (Turin: Silvio Zamani Editore, 1994), and Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista: Vicende, identità, persecuzione (Turin: Einaudi, 2000). Sarfatti dwells less upon supposed Nazi influence and more upon Italian roots and support for Mussolini’s anti-Jewish measures than earlier standard accounts, Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Renzo De Felice, The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History (New York: Enigma Books, 2001) (Italian ed., 1988). Sarfatti presents his conclusions briefly in “The Persecution of the Jews in Fascist Italy," in Bernard D. Cooperman and Barbara Garvin, eds., The Jews of Italy: Memory and Identity (Bethesda, MD: University Press of Maryland, 2000), pp. 412–24.

  67. John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 40.

  68. For the overt racism with which Fascist colonial wars were waged, including the intent to eliminate whole “inferior" populations, see Angelo Del Boca, “Le leggi razziali nell’impero di Mussolini," in Del Boca et al., Il regime fascista, pp. 329–51, and works on Italian colonialism cited in the bibliographical essay, p. 237.

  69. David I. Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2001), marshals irrefutable evidence from Vatican publications, though he goes too far in including some nonpapal materials.

  70. The Vatican explicitly approved Vichy French discrimination against Jews in employment and education. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 200–02.

  71. Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941–1943 (London: Routledge, 19
91).

  72. Police chief Bocchini apparently told Mussolini in June 1940 that only antiFascists were for war, for they thought it would rid them of the hated regime. Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), p. 64.

  73. See the bibliographical essay, p. 238.

  74. F. W. Deakin, The Six Hundred Days of Mussolini (New York: Anchor, 1966), pp. 144–45. Prince Borghese was sentenced to prison in 1949 for his actions against the Italian Resistance, but spent only ten days in jail. After the war he was an official of the Italian neo-Fascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), for which see chapter 7.

  75. Primo Levi, “The Art of Fiction, CXL," Paris Review 134 (Spring 1995), p. 202.

  76. Sergio Luzzatto, Il corpo di Mussolini: Un cadavero tra imaginazione, storia, e memoria (Turin: Einaudi, 1998).

  77. Nazi authorities killed anyone trying to surrender, in a policy called “strength through fear." See Antony Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 (London: Viking, 2002), pp. 92–93 and 127; and Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler, pp. 236–42.

  78. See chapter 6, p. 163.

  79. Omer Bartov shows how the harsh conditions and genocidal intentions of the Russian campaign inured the army as well as the SS to brutality in Hitler’s Army: Soldiers,Nazis and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),

  and The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare,

  2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

  80. See chapter 5, note 43.

  Chapter 7: Other Times, Other Places

  1. Ernst Nolte, Der Fascismus in seiner Epoch (Munich: Piper, 1963), translated as Three Faces of Fascism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 4.

  2. See chapter 3, note 70.

  3. According to Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 221–22, many Germans blamed Hitler personally by spring 1945 for their suffering.

  4. R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 28, 30, 61, 67–68, 147, 150, 159, 162, 179, and 235, lays more stress than most on an incompatibility between individualistic consumerism and the obligatory community of fascism. Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 10, 15, and passim, shows convincingly how consumerist commercial culture helped subvert the Fascist ideal of submissively domesticated womanhood. See also Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1919–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 496.

  5. Payne, History, concluded that “specific historic fascism can never be recreated" though fascists remain, in reduced numbers, and “new and partially related forms of authoritarian nationalism" might appear (pp. 496, 520).

  6. Mirko Tremaglia, who had been a junior official of Mussolini’s republic of Salò in 1943–45, was elected at this point chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Italian parliament. It is true that some officials of the Federal Republic of Germany, including Chancellor Hans-Georg Kiesinger, had been Nazi Party members in their youth, but they had not continued to belong to a neo-Nazi party after the war, and no neo-Nazi party has participated in either local or national government in Germany.

  7. See the special issue of Patterns of Prejudice 36:3 (July 2002) on radical right groupuscules, put together by Roger Griffin.

  8. Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997).

  9. Nolte, Three Faces, pp. 421–23.

  10. Diethelm Prowe, “ ‘Classic’ Fascism and the New Radical Right in Western Europe: Comparisons and Contrasts," Contemporary European History 3:3 (1994); Piero Ignazi, L’estrema destra in Europa (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000).

  11. See chapter 7, p. 191, and chapter 8, p. 216.

  12. The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Berkeley Books, 1961), p. 176. See also The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), quoted in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The CollectedEssays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. III: My Country Right or Left, 1940–43 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), p. 93.

  13. The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) outlawed all overt expressions of Nazism, but permitted party pluralism. Thus radical right parties that were neo-Nazi in all but name and symbolism existed legitimately, plus a more overtly Nazi underground. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany), by contrast, permitted only the Communist Party and the Socialist Unity Party to exist, so no right-wing heirs to Nazism could function overtly in its territory. It claimed that since Nazism derived from capitalism, it could exist only in West Germany. See Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

  14. Payne, History, p. 500.

  15. In the parliamentary elections of 1992, the Lega Nord won almost 19 percent of the northern vote (8.6 percent nationally) by playing on northern small businessmen’s resentment of the social burden of the Italian south, expressed in terms approaching racism. See Hans-Georg Betz, “Against Rome: The Lega Nord," in Hans-Georg Betz and Stefan Immerfall, eds., The New Politics of the Right: Neo-PopulistParties and Movements in Established Democracies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 45–57.

  16. Tom Gallagher, “Exit from the Ghetto: The Italian Far Right in the 1990s," in Paul Hainsworth, ed., The Politics of the Extreme Right: From the Margin to the Mainstream(London: Pinter, 2000), p. 72.

  17. Stanley Hoffmann, Le mouvement Poujade, Cahiers de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques #81 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1956).

  18. In addition to books on the Front National listed in the bibliographical essay, p. 249, see Nonna Mayer, “The French National Front," in Betz and Immerfall, eds., New Politics, pp. 11–25, and Paul Hainsworth, “The Front National: From Ascendancy to Fragmentation on the French Extreme Right," in Hainsworth, ed., Politics of the Extreme Right, pp. 18–32.

  19. A good introduction is Roger Eatwell, “The BNP and the Problem of Legitimacy," in Betz and Immerfall, eds., New Politics, pp. 143–55.

  20. Stephan and Norbert, My Father’s Keeper: Children of Nazi Leaders (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001).

  21. Piero Ignazi, “The Silent Counter-Revolution: Hypotheses on the Emergence of Extreme Right-Wing Parties in Europe," European Journal of Political Research 22 (1992), pp. 3–34, supports most of these points.

  22. John M. Cotter, “Sounds of Hate: White Power Rock and Roll and the Neo-Nazi Subculture," Terrorism and Political Violence 11:2 (Summer 1999), pp. 111–40. I owe this reference to Jeffrey M. Bale, who points out that “oi" music is not necessarily racist or violent.

  23. Susann Backer, “Right-Wing Extremism in United Germany," in Hainsworth, ed., Politics of the Extreme Right, p. 102. The most shocking incidents were the firebombing of refugee hostels that killed Turkish women and children: three at Moelln, near Hamburg, in November 1992, and five at Solingen in May 1993.

  24. International Herald Tribune, June 14, 1994, p. 15.

  25. Precedence for the French in employment and exclusion of foreigners from benefits are important elements in the program of the French Front National.

  26. The eclipse of the communist enemy permitted some radical Right groups, once grudgingly aligned with the United States through anti-Communism, to give high priority to a previously repressed distaste for “American materialism" and globalized mass culture. See Jeffrey M. Bale, “ ‘National Revolutionary’ Groupuscules and the Resurgence of Left-Wing Fascism: The Case of France’s Nouvelle Résistance," Patterns of Prejudice 36:3 (July 2002), pp. 24–49.

  27. Piero Ignazi, L’estrema destra in Europe, p. 12, calls the forms of extreme Right that correspond to these two generations “traditional" and “postindustrial." Pascal Perrineau uses the same distinction.

  28. This is the subtitle of Hainsworth, ed., The Politics of the Extreme Right.

  29. Paul Hainsworth, “The Front National from Ascendancy to Fragmentation on the French Extreme Right," in Hainsworth, ed., Politics of the Extr
eme Right, p. 18.

  30. Pascal Perrineau, Le Symptôme Le Pen: Radiographie des électeurs du Front National (Paris: Fayard, 1997), identifies five types of FN voters, some coming from the Left, some from the far Right, many from mainstream conservatism. See also Nona Mayer, Qui vote Le Pen? (Paris: Flammarion, 1999).

  31. While Le Pen talked vaguely of replacing the Fifth French Republic with a “Sixth Republic," he emphasized limited changes like stronger police, economic and cultural protection against “globalization," and “national preference" that would close the welfare state to noncitizens. Hainsworth, “Front National," pp. 24–28.

  32. Ibid., p. 20.

  33. Berlusconi owned, among many other properties including most of the Italian media, the popular soccer team Milan A.C.

  34. Piero Ignazi and Colette Ysmal, “Extreme Right Parties in Europe: Introduction," European Journal of Political Research 22 (1992), p. 1.

  35. Tom Gallagher, “Exit from the Ghetto: The Italian Far Right in the 1990s," in Hainsworth, ed., Politics of the Extreme Right, p. 75.

  36. In a poll of delegates to the seventeenth MSI congress in 1990, only 13 percent defined themselves as democrats, while 50 percent considered democracy “a lie"; 25 percent considered themselves anti-Semitic, and 88 percent affirmed that Fascism was for them the key historical reference. Piero Ignazi, Postfascisti? Dal movimento sociale italiano ad Alleanza nazionale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), pp. 88–89.

  37. See chapter 3, pp. 69–70.

  38. Prowe, “ ‘Classic’ Fascism and the New Radical Right," p. 296. Mussolini, it is true, advocated reduced state economic intervention until 1925.

  39. The young man who fired upon French president Jacques Chirac during the July 14, 2002, celebrations in Paris was simultaneously a militant with a neo-Nazi action squad, Unité Radicale, a reader of Mein Kampf, and a candidate in local elections for the ostensibly more moderate Mouvement National Républicain of Bruno Mégret, Le Pen’s former heir and chief rival. See Le Monde, July 30, 2002, p. 7: “Entre mouvements ultras et partis traditionnels, des frontières parfois floues."