On the Origin and Evolution of European Fascism

Introduction
by Myra Moss

The development of European fascist ideology was influenced by the

nineteenth- and twentieth-century Romantic rebellion against Enlighten-
ment philosophies. Intellectually, fascism represents a profound shift
from an Enlightenment to a Romantic view of nature and humanity:
this shift involves the rejection of a realist theory of an independently
existing universe, as composed of distinct and separable material atoms,
along with the denial of an a-historical essence of humankind, which
remains the same regardless of historical circumstance and differs fun-
damentally from nature and from the state; and the acceptance of an
idealist conception of a spiritual yet historical, evolving, organically uni-
fied reality, which includes the self as a necessary part of it.
The Romantic conception of the organic unity  among all existents,
in contrast to the Enlightenment atomistic way of thinking, became
essential, for example, to the fascist conception of the state. The con-
cept of reality as a synthesized organism, rather than a collection of dis-
crete entities, presupposes that any existent taken as a whole is greater
than the numerical summation of its parts. “Greater” means not merely
larger in some quantitative sense, but also qualitatively better or more
valuable. In the fascist state, moral dilemmas between values of institu-
tions—whether political, economic, or sociological—and individuals
became settled in favor of institutional values and justified in terms of
the greater value expressed by the organic unity  of the institution, of
the whole of which the individual forms merely a part.

 The origin of the term “fascism” lies in the Latin word “fascis” that referred to
the bundle of rods surrounding a protruding axe and symbolizing a union of
force, which lictors carried before a magistrate. During the nineteenth cen-
tury, “fascio,” meaning a union of forces, more or less homogenous, but held
together strongly by ideal and disciplinary chains, along with common goals
to be reached, denoted extra- and anti-parliamentary groups. See Delzell, below.
 During the twentieth century, the concept of organic unity, which has been
presupposed by both fascists and non-fascists, has been severely criticized by
the positivist tradition and deconstructionist theories.
 The presence of an organic unity requires that the relations between parts of a
whole be necessary, not accidental or fortuitous, such that if any part is changed,
then the whole organism must also be altered.


 What implications did the new Romantic concept of organic unity
have for the idea of self? Romanticism affirmed the syntheses of all dia-
lectical opposites that occur within human consciousness. The classical
Enlightenment dualisms between expressions of pure reason and rational
will became viewed accordingly as indistinguishably merged with one
another. The Romantic ideal was of man unified in thought and action
or will, as contrasted with the Enlightenment abstract vision of the pure
intellectual or disinterested scientist. Friedrich Nietzsche’s conceptions
of human nature as exhibiting a will-to-power and of the superman,
who expresses it to the highest degree, especially influenced Hitler’s idea
of the Übermensch, as well as Mussolini’s idea of the uomo fascista.
Mussolini also denied that fascism embodied any absolute dogmas or
enduring principles, save those of expediency and power. In short, the
superior man, by exercising his will to power, creates values for the rest
of society. Sociologically, “fascism” meant a blurring of what had been
rigid class distinctions and thus a lessening of monarchical power. Cultur-
ally, fascism celebrated the artist, the athlete, the worker, and the soldier.
Ideas and the external world, considered by the Enlightenment as
also dialectically opposed to each other, were synthesized in Romantic
philosophy to become the phenomena or appearances that form objects
of consciousness. All real objects, whether facts or values, are essentially
mental and spiritual creations of human consciousness. But if the real
world is constructed by the human self, does the self remain window-
less, imprisoned entirely in a universe of its own making? Not at all.
When the self reflects upon the nature of its consciousness, it realizes
that its essence is organically related to other selves, as well as to the
history and culture of its nation, by means of vehicles of communica-
tion: verbal and non-verbal language. Whereas the Enlightenment pre-
supposed an atomistic conception of self that remains autonomous in
its relations to other selves and to its state, the Romantics recognized
the essential unity of a self that includes its links to other humans—
both past and present.
The self aims to become aware of its essential unity by means of self-
knowledge; and the goal of the state is to express a unified conscious-
ness through its citizens. Consistent with the Romantic conception
of self and nation, fascism called for the construction of a state—with
unified political and economic institutions, and definite geographical
borders—upon the nation, composed of persons bound together by lan-
guage, history, and culture. This extra-territorial conception of nation
came to justify foreign adventurism—the imposition of a foreign policy
of annexation.

 We have seen that according to the Romantic conception of reality,
all values are creations of self. Consistent with this conception, fascist
philosophy held that rebellion against the state in the name of abstract,
permanent ideals that supposedly exist independently of human beings,
or in the name of innate natural rights, was not justifiable. Neverthe-
less, for fascism, reform or even “revolution,” understood in terms of
the evolutionary progress of human nature and values occurred con-
tinually within the state. Conflict was included within the structure of
all political institutions and was destined to be resolved within more
harmonious political entities. Tragically, fascist conflict often produced
disharmony instead of superior harmony, and at times, even ended in
chaos that lacked any positive accomplishment.
What implications did the Romantic concept of organic unity have
for fascist pedagogy? The terms of the classical dualism between educa-
tion as theoria and moral instruction as praxis became considered as
indistinguishably merged with one another. Educational theorists then
inferred that the teacher is not a mere transmitter of “facts,” or a pas-
sive instrument of communication. He or she is the originator of cul-
ture and values.
Enlightenment philosophy, moreover, had separated the contents of
consciousness into objective and subjective and thus had presupposed
the objective existence of a reality that existed independently of rational
will; a reality that was to be observed and verified by an unemotional
observer. In education, this metaphysical bifurcation between thought
and reality had led to a division between objective sciences and subjec-
tive humanities. However, just as consciousness creates the unity of
object with subject, the fascist educators reasoned, so should the educa-
tional curriculum express a unified scientific humanism.
Inasmuch as the self depends for its existence upon its relations to
other selves and upon its nation, fascist pedagogy argued further that
all learning should be considered as national. The school is the primary
instrument whereby a unified consciousness becomes realized.

 By , Giovanni Gentile, the self-proclaimed spokesman for fascist philoso-

phy, was considered by some Europeans and Britons to be the most influential
teacher in the Western intellectual world. From  to  Gentile served as
Mussolini’s first Minister of National Education (Mussolini had changed the
title from Public Instruction) and implemented what became known as “la riforma
Gentile.” In Germany, Martin Heidegger’s acceptance of the Rectorship at
Freiburg University provided cultural respectability for the Nazi dictatorship.
In , his Rectorial Address, “The self-Affirmation of the German University,”
fused classical philosophy with Nazi rhetoric.


Intellectual needs of citizens were to be filled by academic courses that
emphasized a positive patriotic history of action and culture and stressed
national contributions to humanity. Like public educational institutions
in all the European fascist countries, art, architecture, and literature
became vehicles of propaganda which served to unify citizens with one
another and with their nation-state.
We have described some of the common roots and ideas of Euro-
pean fascisms as residing in the Romantic rebellion against Enlighten-
ment philosophy. Indeed, the similarities among the fascisms were far
more profound than the differences between them. The essays that
follow treat specifically the Italian, German, and Austrian variants of
European fascism. They were taken from a series of five lectures on the
ideological roots of European fascism, which were delivered during the
fall of , and sponsored by The Family of Benjamin Z. Gould Center
for Humanistic Studies and Claremont McKenna College. Since these
essays will detail the special characteristics of various fascisms, we will
mention only two of the most salient to serve as an introduction to them.
In “Fascism in Italy: Origins and Ideology,” Charles F. Delzell  dis-
cusses the Italian corporate state as distinguished from the national so-
cialism that characterized the fascist regimes occurring elsewhere in
central and southeastern Europe. Ideologically its roots lay in Catholic
social doctrine and in the Sorelian syndicalist tradition. The purpose of
the corporate state was to end industrial strife by resolving conflicts
within the higher purpose and needs of the nation-state. It was to be
governed by representatives, furnished by corporations and by citizens
organized as producers, which were determined territorially in elected
comizi. Political factors were to dominate economic ones. The corpo-
rate order was conceived as a strict coordination of national forces, a
means of greater production, of greater internal harmony and power. It
was to serve the state in securing its goals.
In “The Origins and Development of the Fascist Right in Germany
and a Critique of the Methods used to Contain It,” Anthony Glees 
argues that the most important characteristics of past and present Ger-
man fascism are claims of German ethnic superiority and anti-Semitism,
rather than, for example, its anti-communist rhetoric. Indeed, in 
most Italians were dismayed when Mussolini imitated Hitler by intro-
ducing a racist and anti-Semitic policy. Certainly, in Italy, ethnic hatred
 Dr. Charles F. Delzell is Professor Emeritus and Adjunct Professor of History,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee.
 Dr. Anthony Glees is Professor of History and Director of European Studies,
The University of West London, London, England.


and cleansing never achieved the degree of virulence that it has expressed
in Germany. The situation was quite different, however, in Austria.
As Bruce Pauley  tells us in “Prelude to Disaster: The Evolution of
Austrian Fascism,” after the Anschluss, the Austrian Nazis were no longer
restrained. “By mid-June ␣ . . . Jews had already been more thoroughly
purged from public life in Austria than in the five years following Hitler’s
takeover of power in Germany.” One reason for the Austrian outburst
of anti-Semitism, far in excess of anything the Italians ever demonstrated,
probably was Austria’s location as a borderland: “Most of its provinces
were located next to states with non-German nationalities, which height-
ened the Austrians’ sense of their own ethnicity.” Other causes lay in
the Austrians’ belief that they could not exist as an independent nation
and in their wish to unite with Germany. Yet despite the fact that since
World War II, Austria has become one of the most prosperous coun-
tries in the world, postwar polls have “revealed that anti-Semitism is
substantially stronger in Austria than in Germany, France, or the United
States.” Nevertheless, as Pauley reassures us, we have reason to hope that
education will contribute to the disappearance of these irrational eth-
nic prejudices.

 Dr. Bruce F. Pauley is Professor of History, the University of Central Florida,

Orlando, Florida.


 Fascism in Italy: Origins and Ideology
by Charles F. Delzell

On  March , a new term, “fascism,” entered our political

vocabulary. On that Sunday afternoon, in the revolutionary atmosphere
of postwar Milan, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist movement of young war
veterans, the Fasci di Combattimento, or “fighting Fascists,” emerged on
the scene. A revolutionary radicalism of the Right, it espoused an
action-oriented, hybrid mixture of ultranationalism, national syndical-
ism, anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism, anti-democracy, and anti-pacifism,
among other things. Later, that same year, a similar movement, but a
far more racist and violent one, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism,
emerged in Germany. In October , the more moderate Italian ver-
sion of Fascism managed to seize political power first. And for a decade
or so, Italian Fascism was to serve as the principal model for kindred
movements elsewhere in the world.
Many of the philosophical roots of Italian Fascism had been growing
in western and central Europe since about the turn of the century, when
two important developments were taking place: an intellectual revolu-
tion in social thought, and the entry of the masses into politics. Here I
can allude only to several of the new currents of thought. One certainly
included the concept of organic nationalism, which was associated with
the writings of Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, Enrico Corradini, and

 In English, Italian Fascism is usually spelled with a capital “F.” Analogous move-
ments elsewhere are often spelled in lower case “f.” The terms “fascism” comes
from the Italian word, “fasci” (plural), which means “bundles,” and was adopted
from ancient Rome to denote a group or alliance, especially if aspiring to politi-
cal power. In –, the Sicilian fasci became virtual peasant leagues. In
–, Benito Mussolini organized the Fasci di azione rivoluzionaria as a
network of pressure groups to campaign for Italy’s entry into the Great War.
 The problem of defining Italian Fascism, which was in constant flux, can prob-
ably best be done by writing its history, as Angelo Tasca suggested in his pio-
neering study, The Rise of Italian Fascism, –, translated by Peter and
Dorothy Wait (London: Methuen, ; reprinted in  by Howard Fertig,
Inc., New York). How to define generic fascism is much more controversial. At
least a dozen interpretations have been suggested. The oldest was that of the
Comintern, which simplistically perceived fascism to be the “agent” of capital-
ism in its final, “imperialist” stage. Variants of this theory have perceived fas-
cism as a new kind of “Bonapartism,” and as a function of a particular stage of
economic growth. Other writers have interpreted fascism as a revolt by the
lower middle-class, which fears status deprivation. Still others have seen fas-
cism as the inevitable development of certain countries like Italy and Germany;


Luigi Federzoni. Another current was formed by Georges Sorel’s revo-
lutionary syndicalism, which rejected parliamentary government and,
with much use of violence and revolutionary myths, advocated instead
government by labor syndicates. Sorel’s philosophy attracted and influ-
enced numerous Italians, including Arturo Labriola, Filippo Corradoni,
Sergio Panunzio, and not least, Benito Mussolini. These prewar cur-
rents also involved Social Darwinism in its many manifestations, along
with its theory of the struggle between nations. The “will to power”
and the notion of a heroic leader, as expounded by Friedrich Nietzsche
and his Italian admirer, Gabriele D’Annunzio, were important. So was
Henri Bergson’s perception of the role of intuition and of élan vital.
Filippo Marinetti’s noisy Futurist movement in politics and the arts pro-
vided one of the radical themes of Italian Fascism. The political soci-
ologist Vilfredo Pareto’s critique of liberalism and of parliamentary
government and his positive evaluation of the role of elites and force in
society greatly influenced Mussolini. To a lesser degree, he was impressed
by the writings of Roberto Michels and Gaetano Mosca. Gustave LeBon’s
study of the manipulation of crowds also appealed to the Fascists.
The experiences of World War I, however, were required for the crystal-
lization of these intellectual currents into “Fascism.” The war demonstrated
the State’s ability to mobilize the masses and the national economy, and
revealed that people often readily accepted quasi-dictatorship. It brought
about the transformation of revolutionary syndicalism into “national
syndicalism,” and encouraged a perception of the importance of those

or as a consequence of the rise of “amorphous masses”; or as “totalitarianism”;

or as a “moral sickness” or as the result of psychological disabilities. The most
recent interpretation is that of Roger Griffin, a British political scientist, who
plays down economic factors and defines generic fascism as “palingenetic
ultranationalism” that seeks through populist mobilization to create a Utopian
rebirth of the nation. It seems unlikely that we shall reach full agreement on
any formula that satisfies all conceivable objections. See Griffin, The Nature
of Fascism (New York: St. Martins Press, ); Stanley G. Payne, Fascism:
Comparison and Definition (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press,
): Renzo De Felice, Interpretations of Fascism, trans. by Brenda Everett Huff
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ); Walter Laqueur, ed.
Fascism, A Reader’s Guide: Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography (Berkeley:
University of California Press, ); A. James Gregor, Interpretations of
Fascism (Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press, ); Alan Cassels,
Fascism (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., ); Charles F. Delzell, ed.,
Mediterranean Fascism, – (New York: Macmillan, ); Eugen
Weber, Varieties of Fascism (New York: D. Van Nostrand, ); and Ernst Nolte,
Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, trans.
by Leila Vennewitz (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, ).


groups, who were regarded as the true “producers” in the nation’s
economy. The war sharply exacerbated divisions between those Italian
patriots who supported the war and those who did not, especially
Marxian Socialists and other pacifists. It also revealed how propaganda
could manipulate the masses.
Numerous domestic political and historical factors help to explain
why Italy was to become especially susceptible to Fascist propaganda.
In contrast to Britain and France, Italy had achieved its national unifi-
cation only recently (–), and it did not have a long experience
with parliamentary government. Regional differences remained strong.
There was much disillusionment with the new national government,
which, for the next half century, was dominated by a small elite of anti-
clerical Liberals, who had been elected by a narrow franchise. Italy’s gov-
ernment was not efficient. Most of the peninsula lacked a tradition of
voluntary civic cooperation. The economy remained predominantly
agricultural, and the land tenure system was often medieval in nature.
Vast illiteracy and poverty prevailed, especially in the South. A high rate
of emigration had occurred by the turn of the century. Only in the north-
western “triangle,” Milan-Turin-Genoa, did an industrial revolution
begin to occur by the s, thereby opening the way for Marxian
Socialist and Sorelian syndicalist movements to displace the anarcho-
socialists, who had dominated the revolutionary Left after the s.
Italy’s industrial revolution, unlike Britain’s, was not spread over a long
time span that would have facilitated an easier accommodation to the
new social tensions.
Political and social disorders were greatly heightened in , when
Italy suffered a humiliating defeat at Adowa during its effort to expand
its fledgling colonial empire from Eritrea into Ethiopia. This triggered
four years of violent turmoil. Fortunately, the situation began to improve
during the era (–) of a more enlightened Liberal premier,
Giovanni Giolitti. In the wake of the Libyan War (–), he recog-
nized the political necessity of moving toward a democratic suffrage.
But in , only one parliamentary election under the new system took

 Regarding prewar and wartime tendencies toward Fascism, see Zeev Sternhall,
“Fascism,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. David Miller
(Oxford and New York: Blackwell Reference, ), pp. –; Zeev Sternhell,
Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste (Paris: Fayard,
); Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ),
chs. –; Adrian Lyttelton, ed., Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile
(New York: Harper, ); and David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and
Italian Fascism (Chapel Hill, N. C.: University of North Carolina Press, ).


place before , when Italy’s belated and controversial entry into the
Great War weakened the entire parliamentary system. Widespread oppo-
sition to the war, especially among Socialists and Catholics, as well as
Italy’s narrow escape from military disaster at Caporetto in October 
left, the country dazed and badly divided.
Most Italians were Roman Catholic, but ever since , when the
“usurping” new Kingdom of Italy seized Rome from the Papacy, bitter
hostility prevailed between Church and State. The Vatican refused to
recognize the legality of the Kingdom and instructed the faithful to boy-
cott national elections. The ban lasted, for the most part, until ,
when the Church, having become afraid that atheistic Marxism might
otherwise dominate the country, allowed a Catholic Popular Party to
organize and participate in the election scheduled for November .
By the end of the war, the Liberals faced a major challenge to their
political hegemony. This watershed in Italy’s political system was caused
when pressure from Socialists, Catholics, and others forced the Liberals
to agree to a new system of proportional representation in parliament.
Going into effect for the elections in , the new system of propor-
tional representation produced a badly splintered parliament. The
Socialists and the Popolari emerged as the two largest “parties of the
masses.” Ideologically incompatible, they were not willing to form a post-
war coalition government. Instead, the Socialists, large segments of whom
were under the spell of the recent Bolshevik victory in Russia, embarked
upon a revolutionary political offensive in Italy’s Po Valley. During the
“Red biennium” of –, the Socialists won control in hundreds
of northern cities. Much of Italy seemed on the brink of civil war.
Meanwhile, political turmoil was exacerbated by Italy’s failure at the
Peace Conference to obtain Fiume and some of the Dalmatian Coast.
Many patriots began to feel that Italy’s war effort had achieved only a
“mutilated victory.” These frustrated ultranationalists began to look for
a more aggressive national leader.
Benito Mussolini, the man who launched the Fascist movement in
, was born in the Romagna region of the lower Po valley in .
His father was an anarcho-socialist blacksmith. Young Mussolini, having
acquired a high school education, started out as a schoolteacher and then
became a journalist. He read voraciously but superficially, and moved
about in northern Italy, Switzerland, and Austria. A chameleon in poli-
tics, early in the century he identified himself with Marxian Socialism,
often adulterated by revolutionary syndicalism. When in –,
Giolitti fought a war to conquer Libya, Mussolini strongly denounced
this “imperialist” conflict. He was promptly arrested. Afterwards, the

Italian Socialist Party rewarded him with the editorship of its official
newspaper in Milan, Avanti! In the autumn of , however, Mussolini
suddenly broke with the Socialist Party’s neutralist line and called, instead,
for Italy to intervene in the Great War on the side of France and Britain.
Expelled from the Socialist Party, the revolutionary heretic soon
established his own interventionist newspaper in Milan, Il Popolo d’Italia.
Along with Gabriele D’Annunzio and others, in May , Mussolini
played a significant role in pushing Italy into the Great War. During
that conflict he served for a time in the army. But after being injured in
the explosion of a trench mortar, he was released and sent back to his
newspaper desk, where he continued to support the war.
In March , the meeting in Milan that founded the Fascist move-
ment attracted somewhat more than one hundred people. Most were
young veterans, and many were members of crack Arditi units, which
were formed in the wake of Italy’s military crisis at Caporetto. Also
present were anticlerical Futurists such as the iconoclastic Filippo
Marinetti, and neo-syndicalists like Michele Bianchi, who had converted
to ultra-nationalism during the war. The new Fascist movement was
vehement in its denunciation of Marxist Socialism and of Democratic
Liberalism, and it did not hesitate to use violence against its foes. At
the same time, it was partly radical in its program, calling for both
anticlericalism and establishment of a republic. It was also partly
“productivist,” with its insistence on support for the country’s genuine
economic producers. The Fascist movement, extoling the “rights of Italy”
and the “values of war,” was defensive about it. This hybrid program
failed, however, to attract many voters. In the elections in November
, Mussolini obtained a scant , votes in Milan, the city which
was his political base. Clearly, something in the Fascist program had to
be changed if the new movement was going to “take off.”
In August and September , the opportunity to achieve a politi-
cal breakthrough occurred when Socialist metal workers had raised the
Red flag over many factories that they had occupied during “sit-in”
strikes. Finally, however, the strikers were forced to accede to the indus-
trialists’ terms. The crisis greatly frightened property owners, along with
others, who were angry with the policy of non-interference maintained
by the Giolitti government. The Fascists promised that they would
 A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, ).
 James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics: Blum, Rathenau, Marinetti (New York:
Harper & Row, ); and Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista
(–) (Rome-Bari: Laterza, ).


restore industrial discipline. As a result of their sudden shift to the right,
the Fascists now received increasing financial support from worried
property owners.
Simultaneously, a reactionary and brutal new form of Fascism, agrar-
ian Fascism, was emerging in the lower Po Valley, where landowners
were alarmed by the efforts of Socialist and Catholic labor leaders to
organize the farm workers. Local Fascist war veterans like Dino Grandi,
Italo Balbo, and Roberto Farinacci now began to organize their own
tame Fascist labor syndicates to challenge the “red” and “white” syndi-
cates of the opposition. They also organized squads of armed Fascist
Blackshirts. These squadristi carried out punitive raids at night, often in
collusion with the police, and with weapons easily obtained from local
army depots. They set fire to headquarters of the farm workers’ unions,
and they beat up and poured castor oil down the throats of those whom
they caught. This aggressive agrarian form of Fascism of the lower Po
valley threatened to overpower Mussolini’s own predominantly urban
Fascism. He managed, however, to retain control by agreeing to amal-
gamate the two currents. No longer could Mussolini, by now the “Duce”
of Fascism, toy with the possibility of a truce with either the Socialists
or Liberals.
At the end of , Fascism attracted additional recruits from Gabriele
D’Annunzio’s rival organization in Fiume. This demagogic poet-
condottiere had seized power in the disputed Adriatic seaport of Fiume
from  until December , when he was finally forced to leave by
order of Premier Giolitti. In Fiume, D’Annunzio had devised many of
the dramatic public rituals that Mussolini’s Fascism now appropriated:
the “Roman” outstretched arm salute; eerie battle-cries; and the liturgi-
cal interaction between the Duce speaking from the balcony and his
followers in the piazza. D’Annunzio had also experimented with a “cor-
porative State,” a political-economic structure that was based on coop-
eration among functional categories of “producers.” Adopted by
Mussolini, this kind of capitalist organization was to be further devel-
oped by the Fascist dictatorship in the mid-s.
By , Italy’s “Red biennium” had petered out. The Fascists were
gaining the clear advantage in Italy’s quasi-civil war. In November, in a

 In addition to Tasca’s book on the rise of Italian Fascism to power, see Roberto
Vivarelli, Storia delle origini del fascismo: L’Italia dalla grande guerra alla marcia
su Roma ( vols.; Bologna: Il Mulino, ); and Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure
of Power: Fascism in Italy, – (New York: Charles Scribner’s, ).
 Michael A. Ledeen, The First Duce: D’Annunzio at Fiume (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, ).


congress held in Rome, Mussolini’s “movement” reconstituted itself as
a full-fledged “party,” the National Fascist Party (PNF). Statistics gath-
ered at that time revealed that the Fascist Party membership was com-
posed predominantly, though not exclusively, of war veterans, young
people, property-owners, and persons from the lower middle-class. The
PNF elected to the lower house of parliament  Fascists, including
Mussolini. But in a chamber composed of  deputies, this was not
nearly enough to enable the Fascists to form a government. And
Mussolini was now in a hurry to seize power. In September , he
decided to go to Udine, one of the battlefields in the recent war. There
he proclaimed a sharp reversal of some aspects of his program. He
repudiated talk of a republic and promised that Fascism would preserve
the monarchy (the House of Savoy). This new policy would neutralize
any resistance from the Armed Forces, which had taken oaths of loyalty
to the King. Mussolini, moreover, extended an olive branch to the
Vatican, intimating that Fascism was ready to negotiate a settlement of
the long, bitter conflict between Church and State.
In October , the Fascist Party moved farther down the penin-
sula to hold its next congress in Naples. There it voted to have its
Blackshirt militias, under the command of four newly appointed
quadrumvirs, converge on Rome and seize political power. Mussolini
hastened back to Milan to await the outcome of the Fascist March on
Rome. If it failed, he could escape to Switzerland.
Before the advancing Fascist militias reached the outskirts of Rome,
the timid monarch, Victor Emmanuel III, decided to reject the advice
of Premier Luigi Facta, who wanted the King to proclaim a state of siege
and martial law. Instead, the King ordered that a telegram be dispatched
to Mussolini, which asked him to form a new government. Mussolini
decided to accept the King’s invitation. As the Fascist leader boarded
the overnight train to Rome, the wife of the British ambassador over-
heard him tell the station master, “I want to leave exactly on time. From
now on everything has got to function perfectly.” Thus originated the
myth that Mussolini caused Italy’s trains to run on time. Next morning,
the Duce was received by the King. Mussolini was still wearing his black-
shirt, rather than the formal attire customary for such important occa-
sions. He apologized for his dress and explained, “I have come straight
from the battle, which, fortunately, was won without bloodshed.”
 Ivone Kirkpatrick, Mussolini: A Study in Power (New York: Hawthorn Books,
), p. .
 Max Gallo, Mussolini’s Italy: Twenty Years of the Fascist Era, trans. by Charles
Lam Markmann (New York: Macmillan, ), p. .


 On  October , Mussolini came to power, legally, At the age of
, he was the youngest premier in Italy’s history. He headed a coalition
government composed of Fascists, Popolari, Social Democrats, Liberals,
and Nationalists. Leaders of his coalition parties naively thought that
they could tame and co-opt the Fascists into Italy’s time-honored sys-
tem of political trasformismo.
An upturn in the economy helped Premier Mussolini’s new govern-
ment. In a move designed to please Army leaders and conservatives,
Mussolini converted the Fascist squadristi units into a more disciplined
MVSN (Volunteer Militia for National Security). He bombarded the
Greek island of Corfu, and he successfully put pressure on Yugoslavia
to relinquish Fiume to Italy. In , the older Nationalist party (the
ANI: Associazione Nazionale Italiana, which dated from ), united
with the Fascist Party, bringing into it a number of prominent and
influential intellectuals, such as Professor Alfredo Rocco and Luigi
Federzoni. But this enlargement of the Fascist Party was still not enough
to alter Italy’s constitutional system. For that, Mussolini would need a
two-thirds majority in parliament. To achieve that goal, he proceeded
to persuade parliament to enact a new electoral law, which would give
two-thirds of the seats to whichever party list won a plurality.
In the ensuing parliamentary elections of April , the PNF claimed
to have won . percent of the votes. But on  May, Giacomo
Matteotti, the widely respected leader of the “revisionist” Unitary
Socialist Party, citing many instances of irregularities and intimidations,
challenged the validity of the outcome. Constant interruptions and
threats from the Fascist benches made it difficult for him to speak. A
few days later, on  June , Matteotti was kidnapped by Fascist thugs
and brutally stabbed to death.
The ensuing political uproar lasted six months. Many of the opposi-
tion deputies, composed of Socialists, Catholic Popolari, Republicans,
and Constitutional Democrats, boycotted sessions of parliament and
organized the Aventine Secession. They pinned their strategy on the
King, by expecting him to dismiss the badly compromised premier,
dissolve parliament, and call for new elections. But the King refused
to act, even though there existed considerable evidence that Fascists
in Mussolini’s own Press office had given the signal to the gangsters to
teach Matteotti “a lesson.” Meanwhile, hard-line squadristi in the Party,
like Roberto Farinacci, urged the Duce to launch a violent counter-
offensive, Fascism’s “second wave.”
On  January , Mussolini decided to carry out a coup d’état. In a
defiant speech before parliament, he took personal responsibility for

everything that had happened, including the rubber truncheons and cas-
tor oil, and promised that everything would be cleared up within 
hours. What ensued was establishment of the Fascist dictatorship “on
the installment plan.” With no resistance from the King, the Fascist
“regime” was consolidated through press censorship and brutal suppres-
sion of opposition groups. One by one, the non-Fascist political par-
ties, labor syndicates, and the Masonic Lodge were banned. Several
anarchist plots against Mussolini’s own life provided the Duce with pre-
texts for each tightening of the screw. The “exceptional decrees” of
November  completed the process. As a result, hundreds of
Communist, Socialist, and other leftist leaders were hunted down and
arrested by the secret police. The Fascist Special Tribunal was created to
prosecute political foes. During the ensuing  years, this Special Tribunal
sentenced more than , individuals to , years of imprisonment.
There was no right of appeal. Many other political foes were convicted
by regular courts and exiled to desolate islands and towns in the South.
The luckier anti-Fascist leaders escaped abroad—clandestinely, because
their passports had been cancelled. Most of them headed to France,
where they tried to regroup and carry on the struggle as best they could.
Henceforth, Fascist Italy was governed by a “totalitarian,” single-party
regime. Party and State were interlocked in an overlapping structure.
Mussolini wore two hats: he was both Il Duce of Fascism and Capo del
Governo (Head of the Government). Before long, he moved his office
into Palazzo Venezia. From its balcony he frequently harangued the
crowds that were dutifully rounded up by party leaders. The Fascist
Grand Council, composed of  appointed gerarchi (“hierarchs”), became
the supreme organ of the Party. Loyalty oaths were required of profes-
sors. Walls were plastered with Fascist slogans that proclaimed, “Noth-
ing above the State, nothing against the State!” “The Duce is always
right!” All that now remained of Italy’s old political system was the weak-
ened monarchy and the appointive Senate, which, however, was soon
to be packed with Fascists. Mussolini’s ingenious compromise with the
House of Savoy, which was described as the “dyarchy” system, survived
until  July . King Victor Emmanuel III was still “head of state”
and commander-in-chief of the regular armed forces, but Mussolini kept
control over the Fascist Militia. Though jealous and often humiliated,
the King gave in to the Duce’s wishes on most occasions, including those
of going to war.
 Charles F. Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies: The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, ; reprint ed., New York: Howard
Fertig, ), p. .


 The Fascist totalitarian regime worked hard and with considerable
success to indoctrinate the Italian populace. The regime mobilized most
of the masses in its support by means of almost incessant propaganda,
Fascist youth movements, a Fascist leisure-time organization, called
“Dopolavoro,” for the workers, and expanded social services. As a result,
the charismatic Duce enjoyed widespread popularity both at home and
abroad. Many conservatives in Britain, France, and America perceived
Mussolini’s Fascism to be an ingenious solution to the industrial prob-
lems of the twentieth century and a “bulwark against bolshevism.”
Many foreigners were also impressed by the Duce’s elaborate politico-
economic system, the Corporative State, which was designed to put an
end to industrial strife. This system had its philosophical roots in
Catholic social doctrine and in the Sorelian syndicalist tradition. Under
Fascism, however, the Corporative State became a cumbersome bureau-
cratic hodgepodge of employers and employees’ “corporations.” These
co-existed under the watchful eye of the Fascist dictatorship, which
always retained the “last word,” and which stood ready to “crack the
whip” over both, if necessary. In practice, the Fascist Corporative State
satisfied employers more than it did the workers; because the employers
were left largely free to organize themselves, whereas the workers were
required to join tame labor syndicates that were sponsored by the Fascists.
Strikes and lockouts were banned. Special labor courts settled indus-
trial disputes. Eventually, the cumbersome apparatus of Mussolini’s
Corporative State was completed by refashioning the lower house of
the emasculated parliament into a new Chamber of Fasces and
Corporations.
The Corporative State did not safeguard Italy from the Great
Depression. Massive unemployment and underemployment persisted
until military mobilization in the mid-s siphoned off some of it.
Other Fascist economic policies included protective tariffs; economic
self-sufficiency, referred to as the “Battle for Grain”; land reclamation;
and public works, such as construction of highways, port facilities, sta-
diums, and government buildings. Fascism glorified “rural values,” but

 See Edward R. Tannenbaum, The Fascist Experience: Italian Society and Culture,
– (New York: Basic Books, ); Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica
del consenso: Fascismo e mass media (Rome-Bari: Laterza, ); Victoria de
Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (New
York: Cambridge University Press, ); Doug Thompson, State Control in
Fascist Italy: Culture and Conformity, – (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, ); and John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism:
The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).


it did nothing to change the medieval land-tenure system in the vast
latifondi estates owned by absentee landlords in Italy’s impoverished
South. During the Great Depression, Fascism also sponsored an inno-
vative system of “parastate capitalism” designed to finance key sectors
of the economy. These gigantic state holding companies, operating under
the new Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, or the IRI, became the
economic fiefdoms of Italy’s ruling party; first the Fascists and then, after
, the Christian Democrats. The IRI and the historic Church-State
agreements were to be two innovations of Fascism that outlasted the
dictatorship.
The Lateran Pacts with the Holy See were signed by Mussolini on
 February . These historic agreements brought an end to half a
century of hostility between Church and State. By the terms of the
Lateran Treaty, Italy and the Vatican now recognized each other diplo-
matically. And by the Lateran Concordat, Roman Catholicism became
the official religion of the state. Italy agreed to enforce Church law
regarding the marriage sacrament. This meant that divorce was illegal.
Any effort to annul a marriage had to be processed by Church courts.
This greatly angered Italy’s Liberals and anticlericals, and even a minor-
ity of Fascist radicals like Filippo Marinetti. The Lateran pacts also called
upon the Kingdom of Italy to make a generous financial settlement with
the Holy See.
The Lateran pacts won Mussolini much praise from devout Catholics,
not only in Italy, but all over the world. With Italian Catholics now
fully integrated into the nation, the Fascist regime enjoyed broad domes-
tic support for several years, despite a flare-up between rival Fascist and
Catholic youth organizations in . This brief squabble between an
authoritarian Church and the would-be totalitarian regime ended with
the Church backing down and restricting its youth groups to purely
religious activities. Fascism’s “years of consensus,” as the historian Renzo
De Felice has labeled them, lasted from  until Italy’s triumph over
Ethiopia in .

 On the Corporative State and Fascist economic policies, one may begin by
reading Roland Sarti, “Fascist modernization in Italy: Traditional or revolu-
tionary?” American Historical Review . (); and Alexander De Grand,
Giuseppe Bottai e la cultura fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, ).
 See Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Gli anni del consenso, – (Turin:
Giulio Einaudi editore, ). For the Lateran pacts, see also Daniel A. Binchy,
Church and State in Fascist Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, , );
and John F. Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism. –: A Study in
Conflict (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, ).


 Meanwhile, in , as the tenth anniversary of the Fascist “revolu-
tion” was approaching, many Fascists were keenly aware that there was
still no authoritative statement defining the Fascist ideology. When, in
, Fascism made its debut, it had lacked the kind of doctrinal clarity
that Lenin’s Communism possessed when it seized power in Russia. Italian
Fascism seemed amorphous and opportunistic. Indeed, it consisted of
several competing fascisms that were cobbled together. It was always
much easier to identify what Fascism was against than what it was for.
One of the major projects to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the
Fascist advent to power was publication in Rome of an impressive
multivolume Enciclopedia Italiana. The editors, understandably, wanted
to include an authoritative article on “Fascismo.” They turned initially
to Giovanni Gentile, a neo-Hegelian philosopher who had joined the
Fascist party in  and had served for two years as Mussolini’s first
Minister of Education. But Gentile’s rather ponderous essay did not
please several leaders of the party’s more anti-intellectual wing. Gentile,
they complained, had gotten his ideas not from the Fascist Revolution,
but from foreigners of the last century such as Fichte and Hegel. This
group insisted that only the Duce should compose and sign so impor-
tant an article. Mussolini thereupon agreed to study Gentile’s draft. He
spent the next three days composing his own supplement to it, which
he subtitled “The Doctrine of Fascism.” Whereas Gentile’s introduc-
tory section was essentially a reprise of an earlier essay he had written in
academic style, Mussolini’s supplement was more straightforward and
popular in tone. What the Duce set forth in this famous essay has some-
times been termed the “working ideology” of Fascism.
Mussolini began by admitting frankly that, back in , “I had no
specific doctrinal attitude in my mind. . . . I had a living experience of
one doctrine only—that of Socialism from / to the winter of
. . . . My own doctrine, even in this period had always been a doc-
trine of action.”
 See, for example, Lyttelton, ed., Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile; and
Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, ch. .
 These and ensuing quotations come from Benito Mussolini, “The Political and
Social Doctrine of Fascism,” International Conciliation, # (Jan. ),
pp. –. An English version is also available in Benito Mussolini, Fascism:
Doctrine and Institutions (Rome: “Ardita,” ), pp. –, reprinted  in
New York by Howard Fertig, Inc. On the evolution of Mussolini’s myth of the
new State, see also Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello stato nuovo dall’antigiolittismo
al fascismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, ); and Pier Giorgio Zunino, L’ideologia
del fascismo: Miti, credenze e valori nella stabilizzazione del regime (Bologna:
Il Mulino, .


 In earlier essays written by Gentile and Alfredo Rocco on the roots
of Fascism, those authors had pointed to the influence of Imperial Rome,
Niccolo Machiavelli, Giuseppe Mazzini, and to theories of the organic
state. To that pedigree, Mussolini now added several publicists who had
been active at the start of the twentieth century. Thus, he explained,
“in the great stream of Fascism are to be found ideas which began with
[Georges] Sorel, [Charles] Péguy, with [Hubert] Lagardelle␣ . . . and with
the Italian trade union movement, which throughout the period –
was sounding a new note of [syndicalism].” In addition to Sorel’s chal-
lenging ideas on the role of myths, force, and revolutionary syndical-
ism, Mussolini underscored the relevance to Fascism of Vilfredo Pareto’s
elitist anti-liberalism, William James’s pragmatism, Friedrich Nietzsche’s
“will to power,” and Auguste Blanqui’s glorification of violence.
Mussolini went on to claim that Fascism had now become a doc-
trine with its own individuality. “Above all,” it “believes neither in the
possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doc-
trine of pacifism—born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of
cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest
tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the
peoples who have the courage to meet it.” “This anti-pacifist spirit is
carried by Fascism even into the life of the individual: the proud motto
of the Squadrista, ‘Me ne frego!’ [‘I don’t worry about death!’], written
on the bandage of the wound, is an act of philosophy␣ . . . and a new
way of life for Italy. Thus the Fascist␣ . . . conceives of life as duty and
struggle and conquest.”
Fascism, the Duce continued, is “the complete opposite of Marxian
Socialism.” “Fascism␣ . . . believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to
say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. . . .
Above all, Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force
in the transformation of society.”
Not only does Fascism combat Socialism, but also “the whole com-
plex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it.” “Fascism denies
that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human
society;␣ . . . and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequal-
ity of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the
mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage.”
The Duce explained that Fascism, “having first (for reasons of expe-
diency) assumed an attitude [favorable to] republicanism, [thereafter]
renounced this point of view before the March to Rome.” It did so
because democracy is a regime “ruled by many kings—more absolute,
tyrannical, and ruinous than one sole king.”

 Fascism, the Duce continued, is in “complete opposition to the doc-
trines of liberalism, both in the political field and the field of economics.”
“But the Fascist negation of Socialism, Democracy, and Liberalism,” he
hastened to add, “must not be taken to mean that Fascism desires to lead
the world back to the state of affairs before . . . . Fascism has not cho-
sen De Maistre for its high-priest,” he explained. Whereas “the nineteenth
century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy,␣ . . .
it may rather be expected that [the twentieth] will be a century of
authority, a century of the Right, a century of Fascism. . . . This will be
the century of collectivism, and hence the century of the State.”
Mussolini then declared that “Fascism conceives of the State as an
absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are rela-
tive, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State.” “The Fascist
State is itself conscious, and has itself a will and a personality—thus it
may be called the ‘ethic’ State.” It “has drawn into itself even the eco-
nomic activities of the nation, and through the corporative social and
educational institutions created by it, its influence reaches every aspect
of the national life␣ . . . all the political, economic and spiritual forces of
the nation.” The State “is the force which alone can provide a solution
to the dramatic contradictions of capitalism.” The individual in the
Fascist State “is not annulled but rather multiplied, just in the same
way that a soldier in a regiment is not diminished but rather increased
by the number of his comrades,” Mussolini asserted. “The Fascist State
organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the indi-
vidual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom
but retains what is essential: the deciding power in this question can
not be the individual but the State alone.”
Turning to the question of the Church, Mussolini asserted that “the
Fascist State is not indifferent to the fact of religion in general, or to
that particular and positive faith which is Italian Catholicism. The State
professes no theology, but a morality, and in the Fascist State religion is
considered as one of the deepest manifestations of the spirit of man;
thus it is not only respected but defended and protected.”
Finally, the Duce emphasized that “for Fascism, the growth of empire,
that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation
of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence.” Italy must pursue a
demographic policy of population growth. “Peoples which are rising␣ . . .
are always imperialist; any renunciation is a sign of decay and of death.”
“If every age has its own characteristic doctrine, there are a thousand
signs which point to Fascism as the characteristic doctrine of our time,”
Mussolini concluded.

 Coinciding with publication of this article was the launching of
“universal fascism” by Italian Fascists who wanted to see the doctrine
copied elsewhere. An effort was made in Lausanne to promote the inter-
nationalization of fascism under Italian auspices, but this did not get
far, chiefly because Hitler’s racist National Socialism was emerging as a
stronger and more brutal rival to Mussolini’s original brand of fascism.
The Duce’s emphasis in his encyclopedia article on Fascist milita-
rism and imperialism was not accidental, because at this very time he
was preparing for an invasion of Ethiopia and establishment of an empire
in east Africa. He was also dreaming of expanding Italy’s influence into
the Danubian, Balkan, and Mediterranean regions. By May , he
succeeded in conquering Ethiopia, in spite of the League of Nations’
weak economic sanctions imposed against Italy. The Duce now had
reached the height of his popularity at home. But his triumph went to
his head. He really began to believe all of the myths he had sedulously
promoted. The cult of ducismo got underway. Mussolini now dreamed
of creating a new warrior breed of “Fascist man,” the uomo fascista.
Moreover, because of his anger toward Britain and France which had
promoted the League’s sanctions program, Mussolini decided to seek
no new accommodation with them. Instead, he would align Fascist Italy
with Nazi Germany. The resulting Rome-Berlin Axis of October 
was solidified by the two dictators’ joint intervention in the Spanish Civil
War on the side of General Franco’s Insurgents. The Axis agreement
signaled the beginning of Mussolini’s decline. During the costly Spanish
Civil War, which dragged on until March , the Duce sacrificed Italy’s
air force, as well as its tanks and artillery. Within Italy, the increasingly
unpopular Axis policy became obvious when Hitler annexed Austria in
, thereby depriving Italy of the strong influence it had formerly
enjoyed in that state.
In the autumn of , most Italians were even more dismayed when
Mussolini imitated Hitler by foolishly introducing a racist and anti-
Semitic policy. He tried to justify this partly on a perceived need to
prevent racial miscegenation in Italy’s new African Empire. Mussolini
found it hard to whip up animosity against the Jews. Only some ,
Jews lived in Italy. Most of these families had been living there for cen-
turies and had become thoroughly assimilated during the period of Italy’s
national unification. Numerous Italian Jews had also been supporters
 See Michael A. Ledeen, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist
International, – (New York: Howard Fertig, ).
 Regarding Mussolini’s aggressive foreign policy, see Denis Mack Smith,
Mussolini’s Roman Empire (New York: Viking, I ).


of Fascism in its early years. One of Mussolini’s former mistresses,
Margherita Sarfatti, was Jewish. After , foreign Jews who had escaped
from Nazi Germany were subject to internment. But most native Italian
Jews, though henceforth severely restricted in their activities, did not
face a threat to their very lives until September , when Hitler’s
Germany seized control of northern Italy. Thereafter, all Jews in the
northern half of the country were brutally rounded up, and more than
, were hauled away to Nazi extermination camps. We must empha-
size that the Duce launched his racial policy entirely on his own.
By , Mussolini was visibly losing his grip. He suffered from a
chronic ulcer and was beginning to look like an old man. He was also
being repeatedly upstaged by Hitler. The Duce had made no plans for a
political successor. His son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Galeazzo
Ciano, aspired to succeed the Duce, but Ciano was disliked by rival
hierarchs. King Victor Emmanuel, for his part, was increasingly unhappy
with the “dyarchy.” Mussolini’s latest mistress, Clara Petacci, was
unpopular. Rumors abounded that the Petacci clan was deeply involved
in the financial corruption that was now pervasive in the regime.
In April , only a few weeks after the end of his costly interven-
tion in the Spanish Civil War, Mussolini ordered the invasion of Albania.
And a month later, he agreed to a military alliance with Nazi Germany,
named the “Pact of Steel.” But in September , when Hitler launched
World War II with his invasion of Poland, Mussolini was in no posi-
tion to help his ally. It was not until June , when Hitler had driven
British forces off the Continent at Dunkirk, and France was on its knees,
that the Italian jackal decided to declare war in order to gain some of
the booty. Once again, the King acquiesced. Hitler treated the Duce’s
intervention with contempt, and he permitted Italy to gather up only a
few territorial crumbs from defeated France.
Soon, British forces in east Africa began to throw the Italians out
of their short-lived empire on that continent. At the same time, British
naval units wrote “finis” to Mussolini’s dreams of converting the
Mediterranean Sea into a new Roman mare nostrum. Mussolini’s
ill-starred invasion of Greece in October  quickly bogged down.
Hitler came to the Duce’s rescue in the spring of . That same year,
the Germans and Italians carved up Yugoslavia between them. In June
, when Hitler invaded Soviet Russia, Mussolini tagged along.
 See Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the
Jewish Question in Italy, – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ); and Susan
Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, Survival (New York:
Basic Books, ).


On  December , three days after the Japanese attacked Pearl
Harbor, Mussolini and Hitler foolishly declared war on the United States.
For Mussolini, the military struggle now went quickly from bad to worse.
By May , Italian forces had to surrender all of Libya, their last foot-
hold in Africa. In July , a huge Anglo-American amphibious force
invaded Sicily. The Duce’s dictatorship now faced its greatest crisis.
In Rome, interlocking conspiracies involving Fascist hierarchs, who
included, among others, Dino Grandi and Count Ciano, as well as the
King and Army leaders, led to the coup d’état of  July . The sickly
Duce was easily arrested. His Fascist regime and Corporative State
crumbled apart amid mass jubilation. In its place emerged a new royal
dictatorship headed by King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Pietro
Badoglio. Six weeks later, this new government signed an armistice with
the Anglo-Americans in Sicily. The armistice was suddenly announced
late in the night of – September, just as Allied forces were landing on
the mainland at Salerno. With Allied help, the poverty-stricken south-
ern half of Italy, now dubbed the “Kingdom of the South,” slowly began
to re-establish the democratic parties and institutions of the pre-Fascist
era. Within a few weeks, the Allies recognized the liberated South as a
“co-belligerent” on their side.
But in the northern, more industrialized half of Italy, the story was
very different. Immediately after the coup d’état in Rome on  July ,
Hitler had anticipated that the Badoglio government would defect from
the Axis. Consequently, he had dispatched massive German forces across
the Brenner Pass. When Italy’s armistice was clumsily announced dur-
ing the night of September , Hitler’s forces quickly overwhelmed and
disarmed the bewildered Italian units. Simultaneously, Nazi commandos
rescued Mussolini from the Apennine ski lodge where the Badoglio gov-
ernment had confined him. Hitler peremptorily ordered the ex-dictator
to form a new Fascist government under the strict supervision of the
Nazi SS. This miserable, -months epilogue to Mussolini’s Fascism was
known as the Italian Social Republic, or more commonly as the
“Republic of Salò,” which took its name from the resort on Lake Garda,
where the Duce improvised his headquarters. Soon, Mussolini ordered
a trial in Verona of those Fascist hierarchs, who, in July, had dared to
vote against him. Most of them, including his own son-in-law, Count
Ciano, were executed by a firing squad.

 See F. William Deakin, The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler, and the Fall of
Italian Fascism (New York: Harper & Row, ).


 The Duce’s puppet regime ordered conscription of new armies and
labor forces to help the Third Reich. He also tried, demagogically, to
win the support of northern industrial workers by reverting to Fascism’s
radical program of . But in vain, because most of the workers were
now looking instead to the anti-Fascist Armed Resistance, which, after
September , was mushrooming throughout the north. The Armed
Resistance was coordinated by Committees of National Liberation that
were composed of resurgent anti-Fascist political parties: Communists,
Socialists, Actionists, Christian Democrats, and Liberals. The Resistance
forces, which often received supply drops from the Allies, played a sig-
nificant role in liberating many of Italy’s northern cities in the final days
of the war.
In April , when Allied forces had at last crossed the Po River, an
Italian Resistance unit near Lake Como captured Mussolini and his
dwindling band of last-ditch supporters who were desperately seeking to
escape with a retreating German convoy. A few hours later, on  April,
a Communist partisan leader who was sent up to Lake Como from
Resistance headquarters in Milan executed Mussolini and his mistress,
Clara Petacci. Other captured Fascist leaders were executed nearby. Next
day, the bodies were hauled to central Milan. There, in a disgusting scene,
a mob strung up the corpses of the ex-dictator and his mistress by their
heels in Piazzale Loreto; the same square in which the Fascists had
executed fifteen captured partisans a few months before. Thus, in the
very city in which the Fascist movement had been born in March ,
Italy’s by now thoroughly despised Fascist regime reached its violent and
sordid end in April .

 Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies: The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance, Part II.


 The Origins and Development
of the Fascist Right in Germany and
a Critique of the Methods Used to Contain It
by Anthony Glees

. Introduction: German Fascism in 

Since October , when Germany again became a nation, but

particularly after the summer of , racist violence has increased. At
times, this increase is attributed to “right wing extremists”; on other
occasions, to “fascists.” My essay seeks to explain fascism primarily
in terms of organized political activity that opposes the processes of lib-
eral democracy, acts violently, and preaches racism. We shall see that
there is no difficulty in calling current German extreme right-wing
behavior “fascist.”
Fascism, traditionally, has been described in terms of its virulent nation-
alism and of its opposition to Marxism and Bolshevism. Today, how-
ever, Marxism and Bolshevism are virtually dead. Yet German fascism,
and other fascist movements, still live. Although residual resentment of
communism may inspire some to political action, present-day German
fascism is motivated by something other than active anti-communism.
After all that has happened in this century, it is remarkable that there
should be a right-wing extremist problem in Germany.
German fascism’s claim to the ethnic superiority of Germans gives it
political continuity. The core tenet of German fascism is racialism, rather
than anti-Bolshevism. In the s and s, what distinguished German
fascism from the fascism of other western European states was the insis-
tence that the German “race” was superior to other “races,” in particu-
lar, to the Jewish “race.” The evidence compiled since , and especially
today, indicates that the same views are still held by German fascists.
It is more than mere coincidence that German national unity has led
to increased fascist activity in Germany. For many Germans, this observa-
tion has prompted a discussion of the German quality of fascism. While
all European nations are currently suffering from its re-appearance and
the case of Germany should not cause us particular alarm, the German-
specific nature of German fascism has generated an increase in sympa-
thy for it within Germany. For those not concerned with German affairs,
its fascism may not require a response that is any different from the
response to fascism anywhere else, including the United Kingdom. Those
who do have a special interest in Germany, however, must regard German


fascism in a special light, because, historically, fascism in Germany has
meant something particular.
The notions of German “superiority” and of “ethnic other,” as trig-
gers to violent political action, did not die with Hitler, who most pow-
erfully articulated it. If German fascism is still able to exploit “ethnic
other,” then existing methods of suppression (which, as we shall see,
simply follow procedures that before  were tried but failed) must be
strengthened by ethical and moral action, along with political and eco-
nomic measures. We need to re-imagine the Europe that confronts us
on the threshold of the twenty-first century; to re-invent the values that
make liberal democracy the most successful form of government; and
to re-state the case for transnational and supranational cooperation as
an antidote to the virulence of aggressive pseudo-nationalism. We must
not only uphold the rights of mankind by legal and political means, we
must also learn to act decently towards each other, regardless of race or
social position.

. The Debate on the Ideological Roots of German Fascism

What is German fascism? Is it Nazism? It seems fair to state that there
were many varieties of German fascism, but that Nazism quickly gained
leadership over them. After , the terms, “German fascism” and
“National Socialism” or “Nazism” have been used synonymously. Yet
National Socialism was but one expression of German fascism. What
were its intellectual or ideological roots? If German fascism was simply
a variant of European fascism, then these alleged roots would have little
significance, unless they led directly to the growth of fascism in nations
other than Germany. If, however, German fascism is unique, then its
origins become important.
It has long been established that “National Socialism was not an
accident of German history. Rather it was the terminus of a broad and
invitingly laid-out path␣ . . . Hitler’s rise to power did not initiate the
crisis; it made it apparent␣ . . . the political and economic conditions of
the Weimar Republic␣ . . . destroyed the forces of resistance and thus en-
abled the disease [which had] a long incubation period, to speed so speed-
ily. . . .” Indeed, for Hermann Glaser, Hitler’s personal contribution to
the rise of Nazism should not be exaggerated: “the crisis would have
come to a head even without Hitler. . . .␣ it would have taken prolonged
therapy to neutralize the poisonous seeds of the th and th centuries.”
 Herman Glaser, The Cultural Roots of National Socialism, (London: Croom
Helm, ), pp. , .


 We cannot say with certainty that Nazism was the only and inevi-
table outcome of the tradition of German nationalist political thought.
That it did not come out of the blue, however, seems obvious: the roots
of fascism go deep and it would be surprising if they had died out with-
out trace. The existence of intellectual roots to German Fascism does
not imply that th century German philosophers are to “blame” for its
excesses, or that its appeal was, and is, intellectual. Nevertheless, one
sinister feature of ethnic hatred is that over the years, many attempts
have been made to justify it on rational or scientific grounds.
More to the point, and perhaps more frightening than the notion of
an intellectual heritage that has generated continuity, students of contem-
porary German fascism must evaluate the academic discussion of the
German-specific nature of German fascism, the so-called Historikerstreit
of the middle and late s. One of several striking features of the recent
German attempt to reinterpret German fascism was a lack of new fac-
tual material. What was new were the extreme and inconsistent inter-
pretations of German fascism, along with the unsavory political impact
on German life that they generated.
Fascism, which includes the German, Italian and French variants,
has been defined by the controversial German historian, Ernst Nolte,
as anti-Marxist radicalism, which propounds what he calls “national self
assertion.” Nolte concluded that “Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks
to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet
related ideology and by the use of almost identical␣ . . . methods, always,
however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and
autonomy.” This definition has been widely accepted, and a number
of scholars argue that its racialism, culminating in the Holocaust, must
occupy a central place in its definition. The theory and practice of geno-
cide must set German fascism apart from other European ones, even if
other fascist movements went happily along with German plans. German
fascism was the motor for genocide, although non-German nationali-
ties often supplied the means.
German fascism also has had a particular relationship with democ-
racy as a form of government. It had the capacity to operate within the
democratic political system, while at the same time seeking to destroy
that system; it was, thus, both revolutionary and yet also quasi-
democratic. Prior to its seizure of power in , and subsequently,
German fascism sought and gained popular support, particularly for its

 Ernst Nolte, The Three Faces of Fascism, translated by Leila Vennewitz (New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, ), pp. , –.


leader, Hitler. After , the Nazis were obliged to “use democracy to
destroy democracy.” The fact that a party has participated or does par-
ticipate in what seems to be normal democratic activity, therefore, does
not imply that it does not seek the overthrow of liberal democracy. As
Hitler himself made clear in a speech in September , Nazis needed
to “educate the German people to fight against the idiotic systems of
democracy and parliamentarianism.
In the s, German fascism tended to be seen, particularly by
German scholars, simply as a variant of European fascism, which opposed
democracy and communism. By the s, German scholars began to
reevaluate German fascism. They concluded that communism was not
the opposite of fascism: both fascism and communism were comple-
mentary, and the real opposition occurred between liberalism and total-
itarianism. This new perspective, which was developed by academics
and politicians, actually helped to promote a revival of fascism. German
fascism was no longer considered as uniquely German, and fascism itself
was viewed as another form of the other vile totalitarianism, communism.

. The Uniqueness of German Fascism: the Question of Genocide

One problem raised by the German historians’ debate, the Historikerstreit,

is also a central concern of this essay: the uniqueness of German fas-
cism. Twenty years earlier, Ernst Nolte had already argued that fascism
was the product of a distinct epoch, not tied specifically to Germany.
Although his book offended many persons who were accustomed to the
more simplistic and convenient analysis that fascism was Italo/German
and a by-product of the political failures of these two nations, the validity
of a comparative analysis of the phenomenon is now wholly accepted.
The debt that Hitler owed to Italian Fascism was plain, as Hitler him-
self demonstrated in private and public until Mussolini’s death.
In the s, however, the debate focused on the central ideological
platform of Nazism, the war of genocide. For German historians, the
issue at stake was whether genocide, as practiced by the Nazis, was a
specifically German phenomenon, or whether it was part of a wider abuse
of political power, common to other totalitarian movements. How cen-
tral was it to the theory and practice of German fascism? If, on the one
hand, the war against the Jews was a German invention, then the con-
sequences for the interpretation of German political development were
dire. If, on the other hand, the war of genocide was but a German

 Quoted by Alan Bullock in Hitler (Dusseldorf: Droste, ), p. .


example of a wider practice, then it was wrong to attribute special blame
to Germany. Such an assertion implied the relativisation of Nazism.
It was not coincidental that the loudest voice pleading for the revi-
sion of the German-specific view of Nazism was that of Ernst Nolte,
who was about to publish Der Europaeische Buergerkrieg –. Here
he argued that Nazism both learned from Soviet Communism and
reacted against it. He suggested further that Nazi genocide was to be
understood as a preemptive strike against putative Soviet genocide against
Germans. There was no new real evidence to back up these surprising
assertions, but his interpretations had both academic and political
consequences.
The statement that “Hitler was no worse than Stalin” would be taken,
in Germany, to mean not that both men and both states were equally
evil; but that the Germans of the Third Reich and the German polity
were not uniquely evil. They, therefore, were less evil than has been sug-
gested. And if the Germans of the Third Reich and the German polity
were not uniquely evil, it might follow that aspects of the Third Reich
were actually positive. Indeed, Nolte argued in favor of a more positive
reinterpretation of the Third Reich by using this analogy. Had the PLO
destroyed Israel, he contended, its history of Israel would have merely
catalogued the negative aspects of Israeli history. He did not say so explic-
itly, but his meaning was plain: until now German history has been
written from the point of view of those who defeated the Third Reich.
Thus its “negativeness” has never been “expressed in a different way.”
Nolte was strongly supported by the late Andreas Hillgruber and J.
C. Fest, an influential senior editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
They suggested, first, that genocide, that is, the extermination of an eth-
nic group and of an economic or social class, was a relatively common
phenomenon in central and eastern Europe. “Genocide” signified
“Asiatic” rather than “European” behavior. Second, they proposed that
both the notion and the trigger for genocide came from the Russian
Communists. Nolte even asserted that Hitler’s anti-Semitic measures
before  were justified, because in , Chaim Weizmann had said
that Jews would fight on England’s side; this statement “entitled Hitler
to treat Jews as prisoners of war.”
One of the outcomes of the debate was a highlighting of the central
importance of genocide for an interpretation of German fascism. Was
German fascism truly no more than a political response to Marxism; or

 E. Nolte, Der Europaeische Burgerkrieg –: Nationalsozialismus und

Bolschewismus (Berlin: Propylaen Verlag, ), pp. , , , , , –, .


was its obsession with race and an ethnically regulated “New Order in
Europe” as important, or even more important, than its anti-Marxism?
Is there any evidence to suggest that historians may have underplayed
the ethnic aspects of Nazism and overplayed its anti-Marxist ones? The
answers to these questions are vital. If ethnicity can be demonstrated to
have been more significant than we have assumed in the past, then the
dangers of current ethnically driven political behavior become even more
serious. Furthermore, if this is so, then the demise of political Marxism
in Europe after  does not mean that today’s German right-wing
extremism cannot be fascist. It is its ethnicity that provides the histori-
cal continuity between the phenomenon we see today, and what occurred
during the period between the wars.
It can be argued plausibly that race is more important in explaining
Nazism than is anti-Marxism. Today’s German hostility towards “for-
eigners” replicates the Nazis’ concern with ethnic others. This may seem
a statement of the obvious, because anti-Semitism has often been the
focus of academic and public interest in Nazism. Although there always
has been an understanding that for the Nazis, the concept of race was
central, this understanding was always qualified by the widespread belief
that the concept itself was meaningless; as meaningless as the Nazi notion
of the “Aryan.” Nazi racialism was thus often reduced not to the oppo-
sition “German/ethnically other” but to “Aryan/Jew”, and also seen as
something inherently crazy, even idiosyncratic, the product of a few,
mad, leading Nazis.
We shall see that although in the ls and subsequently, “the Jews”
were considered by the Nazis to be the least acceptable ethnic group,
the Jews were not the only ethnic group believed inferior to the “Aryans.”
Both before  and after, race, then, lay at the very heart of Nazism.
Nowhere is this fact seen more clearly than in the views expressed by
Hitler. The idea of ethnicity as a trigger for violent political action, how-
ever, did not die with Hitler, even if he most powerfully articulated it.

. Hitler and Genocide

Nolte and his allies were offering not merely a reinterpretation, but
also a rehabilitation of Hitler’s image. Some historians insisted that Hitler
and his closest comrades played a secondary and subsidiary role in the␣ pro-
cess of genocide. The impact, which such theories might have on German
political life, is plain: if Hitler was wicked primarily because he had
ordered the extermination of the Jews and if this claim was not true,
then Hitler might not be as wicked as had been alleged. Fest, approvingly,
showed that both Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen had proved that

the Nazi leaders had not opted for extermination at the beginning of
their period in power, but were “prisoners in a process which their phrase-
ology, their laws and a complex of activities had set in motion.”
Mommsen even argued that although “his fanatical hatred of Jews
was of decisive importance for Hitler’s general political conduct␣ . . . he
did not show much interest, and certainly no active involvement, in
the individual steps of anti-Jewish policy␣ . . . In general, he would avoid
committing himself directly to anti-Jewish actions, especially since he
was aware that these were received rather negatively by the German
people.” We learn that “Hitler never sympathized with the course of
excluding the Jews from social life by legislative means” which was
executed by “bureaucrats.” Mommsen quoted from Gerald Fleming’s
and David Irving’s work to suggest that Hitler avoided any direct
“identification” with genocide and that it was never discussed in his
immediate circle. Mommsen alleged that there was no order from Hitler
to exterminate Jews.
Most non-German scholars were entitled to be shocked by these over-
elaborate theories. After all, Hitler never concealed his aim of destroy-
ing the Jews. The supposition that there is no direct order linking him
with the technical achievement of the “final solution” may be explained
by the need for utmost secrecy in realizing it: Hitler clearly believed
that genocide was the right policy for the Third Reich. He was never
wholly certain that the German people would support him on it.
Himmler, who did not balk at speaking to his SS men about the policy
of genocide, also made it quite clear that the Nazis wished it to be a
secret policy whose history would never be written.
Hitler’s views on ethnicity may well have been one of his most sig-
nificant contributions to German fascism. He articulated them with such
great conviction and force that they became part of it. Genocide, more-
over, was German-specific. In short, German fascism was a German vari-
ant of a European phenomenon, wherein the ethnic superiority of the
German Aryan and the desire to exterminate the Jews were the key com-
ponents. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was specifically German-Austrian, while
also fitting into a wider European context: German fascism does not
need to be feared any more, or any less, than other fascisms, which incite
citizens to ethnic violence and bloodshed.
Central to Hitler’s thought were the notions of German ethnic supe-
riority and the need to subject Jews to “racial cleansing.” In , he
 Hans Mommsen, “Anti-Jewish Policies,” in Hedley Bull, ed., The Challenge
of the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. ff., ,
–, .


told a Munich journalist that “when I really am in power, then the anni-
hilation of the Jews will be my first and most important task. As soon
as I have the power to do it, I shall, for example, have erected in the
Marienplatz in Munich gallows and more gallows␣ . . . The Jews will be
hanged, one after the other, and they will stay hanging until they stink.
They will hang as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as
they have been taken down, the next ones will be strung up and this
will continue until the last Jew in Munich is destroyed. The same will
happen in other German cities until Germany is cleansed of the last
Jews.” The content of his speech of  January  followed directly:
“if international finance Jews outside Europe succeed in pushing the
German people again into a world war, the result will not be the
Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of the Jews but the
extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.” This passage was often
quoted by Hitler.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not marginal, but central to his public and
private acts as Germany’s political leader. Hitler tells us where he thinks
he picked the idea up, but even if, as seems unlikely, Hitler got the idea
of extermination from the Bolsheviks or Turks, this hardly contradicts
the German character of genocide or exonerates German political
development from complicity in it. Furthermore, it was a doctrine shared
by his paladins and more widely in Germany and German Austria at
the time.
Hitler begins the very first page of Mein Kampf with a statement of
the significance of ethnic bonding amongst Germans. He also gives it a
foreign policy value: “German-Austria must be returned to its great
German motherland and not for economic reasons. No, no. Even if this
union—in economic terms—had no impact, yes even if it was economi-
cally harmful, it would still have to take place. The same blood [written
in emphasis] belongs in the same Reich␣ . . .”.
Mein Kampf also offers early insights into Hitler’s anti-Semitism. He
learned it in Vienna rather than at home or at school (or Munich): “it
was only when I was fourteen or fifteen that I came across the term
‘Jew,’ often in a political context. I experienced mild feelings of
unease␣ . . . Linz had few Jews. Externally they become Europeanized

 Quoted in Charles Bracelan Flood, Hitler (London: Hamish Hamilton, ),

p. .
 Speech printed in Max Domarus, Hitler Reden und Proklamationen, ii, 
(Munich: ), pp. ff.
 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., ), p. .


and human [menschlich]; indeed, I held them to be Germans␣ . . . And
then I went to Vienna␣ . . . which has a population of two hundred thou-
sands of them␣ . . .” He concludes: “Was there ever some wickedness,
some act of shamelessness in one form or another, particularly in cul-
tural life, in which at least one Jew did not play a part? Even as one
might cut cautiously into a cyst, one would find, like a maggot in a
rotting corpse, quite often blinded by the sudden light, a little Jew␣ . . .”
Hitler later adds that during the First World War, he preferred to hide
behind trees rather than salute Jewish officers.
After the war, his hatred of the Jews became an integral part of his
political message. There is no real evidence that those who flocked to
listen to him were unsettled by what he had to say. In , for example,
when Walter Rathenau was made foreign minister, Hitler told a crowd
of  Bavarians that the appointment of a Jewish foreign minister
was simply unacceptable to true Germans and then, in the same breath,
called for the capital punishment of all Jews who “polluted” Aryan girls.
The audience showed their approval by chanting “Rathenau—Judensau”
which, though hardly eloquent, nevertheless served to demonstrate
clearly that they liked what Hitler was saying. Hitler believed that his
anti-Semitism was popular. Certainly, Nazis and others involved in the
execution of genocide seemed content with the policy.
For Hitler personally and his version of fascism, anti-Semitism occu-
pied a central place. Most of what he sought to do, whether inside
Germany or beyond its frontiers, was motivated by a desire to destroy
the Jews of Europe. Hitler’s earliest statements to his first policies in
government (the burning of books, the purging of political institutions),
to the plans for genocide and the accompanying war on the Soviet
Union, demonstrate that genocide was a necessity. Hitler’s anti-Semitism
was thus a key contribution to the shaping of German fascism. In ,
other German fascists might have won power if Hitler had been dead
or in prison, and they might have been less keen on genocide. Yet the
fact is that it was Hitler and no other Fascist leader who was successful.
Hitler never changed his views on Jews. Indeed, during his entire
political career, there is a remarkable consistency about what he said
and wrote about Jews. Almost twenty years after his outpourings in Mein
Kampf, he could still tell his dinner-table circle that Jews were a virus
and that the work the Nazis were doing in exterminating them was
on a par with the achievement of Louis Pasteur. In his final will and
testament of  April , Hitler repeated his belief that the war had
been caused by the Jews and not by him.


 . Anti-Semitism as the Expression of German Ethnic Superiority

Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer and later in charge of German-occupied

Poland, was seen by early contemporaries as a “well educated attorney,
highly cultured and cultivated.” He, too, had a clear vision of what he
regarded as the necessity of ethnic cleansing. Hans Frank informed a
Nazi journalist, a visitor from Berlin, “If I were to have one poster printed
for every seven Poles I’m going to have shot, all the trees in Poland
couldn’t provide the paper␣ . . . After the war, you can make mincemeat
out of the Poles and Ukrainians and anybody else hanging around here
as far as I am concerned.” He told a gathering that “we must obliterate
the Jews wherever we can find them and wherever the opportunity is
afforded us␣ . . . We cannot shoot the . million of them, we cannot kill
them with poison but can proceed with the necessary steps which some-
how or other will lead to their successful extermination.” On  August
, he spoke to German troops and a delegation of Polish and Ukrai-
nian Nazi sympathizers. He thanked Hitler for having given him con-
trol of “this ancient nest of Jews␣ . . . Once, there were thousands of Jews,
hideously repulsive Jews, but now I can’t seem to find any. Don’t tell
me you’ve been treating them badly␣ . . .” The stenographer noted that
the audience reacted to these remarks with “great hilarity.”
Heinrich Himmler explicitly recognized that genocide would be sup-
ported, if it were presented as an act of “ethnic cleansing.” Even so, he
believed, many Nazis might be unwilling to see policy converted into
practice. He accepted, too, that the secrecy with which genocide was
being executed, denied the SS their rightful place in German history.
As he put it to his SS leadership at a speech in Posen on  October
: “one principle applies absolutely to every SS man: he must be hon-
est, decent, loyal and comradely to members of his blood but to no one
else␣ . . . if by the building of an anti-tank ditch , Russian women
die is of interest to me only because the anti-tank ditch needs to be
completed for Germany␣ . . . As far as the evacuation of Jews is concerned,
the extermination of Jews, it belongs to the things that are easy to say.
‘The Jewish race will be exterminated,’ says every Party member ‘no
question, it’s in our program, removal of Jews, extermination, we’ll do.’
And then along come  million Germans and each one has their decent
Jew. It’s clear—the other Jews are swine but this one is a tip-top Jew.
But none of those who speak in this way has watched, has had to stand
through what you have stood through. Most of you know what it means
if  bodies lie there, if  or  are there and you, apart from acts
 Gerald Posner, Hitler’s Children (London: Mandarin, ), pp. , , , .


of human weakness, have remained decent. That has made us hard. That
is a glorious chapter of our history that has never been written and never
will be.” Himmler’s anti-Semitism was every bit as deeply held as
Hitler’s and, according to a recent biography, was not learned from Hitler
but resulted from his own musings.

. German Ethnic Superiority and the German People

We cannot claim that genocide was popular. It seems probable that

many Germans hated it. Himmler believed that even Nazi party mem-
bers might not support it. Genocide was executed under conditions of
secrecy. Yet the evidence is not only that many of the peoples controlled
by the Germans after , Poles, French, Dutch, Balts, Russians and
so on, willingly took part in the Nazi crusade against the Jews, but that
the many hundreds of thousands of Germans who became involved in
the extermination process gave it their passive support, or worse.
The message that the Germans were ethnically superior to the Jews
seems to have been widely accepted. Interestingly, one of Hans Frank’s
sons related how his mother took him to visit the Warsaw Ghetto. His
testimony is a stark description of ethnic otherness. The boy asked his
mother, “why the people had stars and who were the men with whips␣ . . .
And when our [official] car stopped, I looked out of the window, and
an older boy was standing outside, staring at me␣ . . . And I made faces
at him, he looked very sad and then ran away␣ . . .”.
The imposed and invented ethnic otherness of Jews was also picked
up by quite ordinary, even simple Germans who were Nazi supporters.
A war diary, kept by a simple Luftwaffe officer, Juergen Flick, made the
following entry for  March : “Visit to Warsaw␣ . . . I repeatedly
found myself coming up against the walls of the Ghetto and decided to
see it. The tram is the only way; it travels through the Ghetto without
stopping. The impression I retain is very strong. I’ve never seen any-
thing like it—people [Menschen] sealed off from other people by walls
and gates. How justified it is that they be separated like this is clear to
anyone who has seen the Ghetto. Jews, just Jews, forced now to rely
only on themselves. From outside you can hear the chanting of Jewish
peddlers, praising their wares␣ . . . everywhere people are haggling. Many
are selling arm bands with the Jewish star and little bits of cake. The
streets were full of Jews. And of the stench that goes with Jews. Jews
 Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution
(London: Bodley Head, ), p. .
 Posner, op. cit., p. .


like a normal European has never seen them. Old one with beards and
fatty, lumpy eyes, eyes dark with evil. Young men, without moral con-
sciences, with hatred and wickedness etched on their foreheads␣ . . .
Corpses lie on the pavements. We went to supper to the Black Forest
Restaurant. Otherwise nothing special happened today.” What is so
striking about this account is not merely how unreflective it was (could
he not understand that what he was seeing, that is that the misery, the
poverty, the death and the hatred were the outcomes of Nazi policy and
not of Jewish volition), but how fully he accepted the idea that the Jews
were not like himself.
At the heart of German fascism, then, there lay the idea of the supe-
riority of the Germanic or Aryan race, along with the alleged ethnic
inferiority of the Jews. Philosophers like Fichte, Arndt, Lagarde, and
Treitschke gave German nationalism a spin, into which Hitler’s politi-
cal thought may be fitted. Langbehn had talked about “clean, good Aryan
blood; of all human bloods, it is the blood that contains the most gold.”
Nazi philosophy was quick to appreciate the significance of this
ethnicity. Robert Ley wrote of his “two dogmas”; the first was the “natural
law of blood, race, energy, courage and motherhood”; the second “the
authority of the Führer, the representative of the German people. When
he orders me to do something, I have to obey␣ . . . the Führer is always
right, in all situations and always.” For Himmler the “one principle of
the SS man is to be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to our own
blood and to no one else␣ . . . a decent attitude to animals and will have
a decent attitude to these human animals. What we care about [Sorge],
our duty is our blood.”

. German Nationalism and German Fascism

German nationalism was more than nationalism. Hitler himself, how-

ever, was not a nationalist in any meaningful sense. His table talk gives
many clues as to where his affections lay: with his dogs, for old party
comrades, for certain artists, musicians, and historical cities, but chiefly
for young members of the armed services, especially those at the front.
Hitler displays an obvious amusement for local habits and customs. At
no time does he demonstrate any genuine affection for those whom the

 Quotation from Juergen Flick, Diaries, privately published in Bremen by Arend

Vollers, p. .
 Glaser, op. cit., p. .
 Quoted in Leon Poliakov and Josef Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker
(Munich: K. G. Saur, ), pp. –, .


Nazis regarded as German “folk comrades” (Volksgenossen). Indeed, he
is often found musing on how they could be regimented and even
intimidated more successfully.
Would a genuine nationalist have condemned his country to the sort
of defeat that befell Germany? Would he have accepted such massive
loss of life? Would he have proposed the establishment of baby farms
and the killing of imbeciles? At first, Hitler had attempted to keep the
deprivation of Germans to a minimum (and was happy to make other
Europeans suffer on their behalf ); but as Germany’s defeat became
inescapable, Hitler cared less and less about the horrors that he was
inflicting on his countrymen. In the final analysis, even though it was
not done in the same systematic way, Hitler was quite ready to see the
Germans go under much as millions of non-Germans had been
dispatched.
. German Fascism since 
We have established the central importance of the concept of ethnic
superiority for German fascism before . What of the period from
 to the present? Since , at least twenty-five people been mur-
dered, that is, beaten or burned to death for racial reasons, in both east-
ern and western Germany. According to official statistics, in  there
occurred  racially motivated fascist attacks on individuals, in which
seventeen persons were murdered, as compared with  in ; an
increase of  per cent. In , two of the worst cases included the
September attack on an asylum seekers’ hostel in Hoyerswerda, where
 people were injured, and the October fire-bombing of a Lebanese
family’s home in Huenxe, where two children suffered appalling burns.
The following year, some of the worst cases were the August riots in
Rostock, when several hundreds of extremists, encouraged by a large
crowd of spectators, attacked an asylum seekers’ hostel. In May ,
three Turkish women were burned to death in a fire-bomb attack on
their home in Solingen in the Ruhr. In , two dozen Hamburg police-
men were suspended following their attack on an immigrant wearing
an anti-Nazi badge; and the Bundestag felt it necessary to pass a law
punishing neo-Nazis and historians who denied the existence of the
Holocaust, with up to five years in gaol.
Chancellor Kohl condemned the Solingen fire-bombing but dismissed
it too by suggesting it was the work of a “few weak-minded individuals.”
The evidence suggests that those behaving in this way do, in fact, believe
they are executing the wishes of the German people. Opinion polls
in Germany have consistently shown that almost half the German

population ( per cent in the west,  per cent in the east) feel “dis-
turbed” by “foreigners” and only ten per cent fewer (in the same pro-
portion) think “foreigners” should “get out” of Germany. It is plain that
the huge influx of aliens into Germany after the collapse of Commu-
nism (numbering almost one million in ) caused very real social
pressures and understandable (if not excusable) resentment.
Yet what is very worrying about extremist behavior is that it finds
nurture in political groupings and parties who exist within the political
system but yet are able to inflame their sympathizers so that both the
sympathizers and the parties are able to eschew liberal political means
for articulating and addressing grievances and, ultimately, are part of
process which ends in the commission of political murders.
The most active radical fascist groups now include Die Republikaner,
led until the summer of  by Franz Schoenhuber, Rolf Schlierer, and
Harald Neubauer; Die Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), led by Dr. Gerhard
Frey; Die “Fascho-Skins” and Die Deutsche Alternative, led by Michael
Kuehnen, now dead, Frank Huebner and Rainer Sonntag. Neverthe-
less, in North-Rhine Westfalia, one local study has indicated that only
three to six per cent of those responsible for these racist attacks are
organized skin-head associations. Yet there is no doubt that these indi-
viduals justified their actions by recourse to right-wing extremist views.
In this sense, these figures imply the problem is more serious than might
at first be thought, since for every organized extremist, there are as many
as ten unorganized ones, prepared to act in an extremist way.
Although German fascism assumes a variety of faces, it is not helpful
to seek to differentiate between the “old” and the “new” ones. The face
of today’s fascism bears a strong resemblance to Nazism. Its roots lie in
National Socialism, and it repeats Nazi claims to ethnic superiority.
Present-day fascists are dedicated to the promotion of the ideas of eth-
nic otherness and of Aryan supremacy, fundamentally indistinguishable
from the notions developed in the s, but adapted to the s and
propagated in appropriate ways.
Public opinion polls have shown that as late as , twenty-six per
cent of West Germans agreed with the statement that Nazism was basi-
cally a good idea, just poorly carried out. In , forty-eight per cent
said if it had not been for the war, Hitler would have been one of the
greatest German statesmen; in  there were still thirty-one per cent
who said this. Polls undertaken in  and  indicated that about
thirteen per cent held fixed right wing views.
Those who are on the receiving end of Fascist violence are chiefly mem-
bers of the . million “foreigners” or “guestworkers” and their families,

or asylum seekers, or economic refugees from eastern and central Europe.
Of these almost one-third are Turkish in origin. Sixty per cent of these
people have lived in Germany for ten years or more; their legal status
was changed by the  nationality act which made it somewhat easier
for them to become German nationals. Yet what is significant about
these “foreigners” is not that they are actually foreign qua foreign. Italian
“guestworkers” do not appear to merit attacks, even though they con-
stitute ten per cent of the total number of “foreigners.” As such, “for-
eigners” are to be considered the contemporary equivalent of the Jews
of pre-war Europe, along with their surrogates. When attacking “for-
eigners,” German fascists are re-enacting anti-Jewish pogroms. The per-
sons who commit the violence are no different from their antecedents
in the s and later, who were members of the SA and other organi-
zations. Nor should we forget that, for various reasons, Jews bore the
brunt of Nazi racialism but were, by no means, the only recipients of it.
What is genuinely frightening, therefore, is the capacity of German fas-
cists to identify other “races” as ethnically inferior.

. The Response to the Fascist Threat:

Containment, Suppression and Repression
Before  and since, the actual response to the German fascist threat
has been the attempted containment of German fascism by legal, police,
and security service means. In , Hitler was sentenced to the mini-
mum of five years in prison for high treason, after the abortive 
putsch. He was released on  December . Hitler was banned from
speaking in Bavaria from  until May  and in other Laender until
September . None of this had much impact on Hitler’s political
fortunes, although two qualifying statements need to be made: first, that
legal means were taken sufficiently seriously by the Nazis to force them
to abandon their putsch strategy and to turn to pseudoparliamentar-
ianism, and, second, that had legal means been even tougher, Nazism
could have been more successfully suppressed, certainly before . Had
Hitler been executed for high treason in , German Fascism might
still have come to power but led by others, whose particular contribu-
tion might have been different.
These measures against the Nazis were by no means the only attempt
to contain German fascism by legal means. Twenty years ago I worked
on the problem of the containment of fascism by the SPD, and con-
centrated in particular on Prussia. Prussia was important for two rea-
sons: it was the largest Land of the Weimar Republic (of  million


Germans in , some  million were citizens of Prussia); and, second,
from  until  the SPD both led and participated in the Prussian
Land government (but were in the government of the Reich for roughly
only four years). As Minister, Grzesinski had to address the fact that
large sections of the population openly supported fascism. It should not
be forgotten that there were many fascist and para-fascist organizations
wooing their support. As Arnold Brecht has pointed out, “prior to ,
the Nazis played a minor role amongst various shades of opposition
to the democratic form of government.” The Stahlhelm, Wiking
and Olympia organizations did much to foster anti-Republicanism and
anti-Semitism. Wiking was led by Captain Ehrhardt, an anti-Semite and
ex-Freikorps leader, who demanded the creation of an ethnic “voelkisch”
Germany. On  April , Wiking and Olympia were banned and
dissolved in Prussia. Grzesinski urged the Prussian police to prosecute
Nazis who had attacked Jewish-looking Berliners in . He even
attempted to extradite Hitler, who was still an Austrian national at this
time, and to ban the Nazis. These attempts, however, proved impossible.
The Stahlhelm, which by  claimed , members, also proved
hard to tackle. It urged all non-Jews, “Deutschstaemmige,” to join it,
and named von Hindenburg as an honorary member. In October ,
the Stahlhelm was banned by Grzesinksi. Hindenburg then intervened:
he asserted that the Stahlhelm were simply “nationally minded,” and
the ban was rescinded.
The resistance to these policies was enormous. Grzesinski had tried
to punish a man who called the Weimar Republic’s flag a “Jew flag.”
He could not get a conviction, because the judge insisted that a Jew
had written Weimar’s constitution. The Stahlhelm newspaper claimed
that Grzesinski was really a Jew called Cohn; it incited children to sing
a song encouraging them “to defecate on the flag of the Republic.”
After , legal means were again employed to contain the problem
of German fascism. First, war crimes trials were designed to criminalize,
punish, and make examples of Nazis; and second, fascist groups were
banned and repressed. In , a storm was caused when a neo-Nazi
party, the Socialist Reich Party, won  percent of the vote in Lower
Saxony. One of its leaders was Major Remer, who had put down the
 coup in Berlin. The Federal Government applied to the constitu-
tional court with a view to gaining a ban; the court decided that the
SRP was neo-Nazis, but it appears to have dissolved itself to avoid almost
certain banning by the West German constitutional court.

 Arnold Brecht, Prelude to Silence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. .


 The British took special interest in the danger of a resurgence of
German fascism. They had led the hunt for Hitler, together with the
NKVD, because they feared that were he alive, he might inspire a Nazi
rebirth. In his memoirs, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, at that time British High
Commissioner in Germany, relates how in  he organized the arrest
of Dr. Naumann, formerly Goebbels’s state secretary, who was trying to
enter German politics via the Free Democratic party. Having tried to
enlist Adenauer’s help, Kirkpatrick then decided to act on his own
authority (the west Germans were still subject to their victors for mat-
ters affecting German security).
In , four organizations were banned as offending against para-
graph  of the German Constitution. Three of them were national group-
ings; one confined to Lower Saxony. These were the National Front
(banned on  November ), the German Alternative (banned on
 December ), the National Offensive (banned on  December
), and the German Comrades Association (banned on  December
). The Government in Bonn, citing article  of the German
Constitution, also acted against individual fascists.
On  September , the German Interior Minister announced that
he was seeking to ban the “Free German Workers’ Party” (FAP) and
that Bavaria, Hesse, and Lower Saxony had announced similar policies.
On the same day, the Land of North Rhine-Westfalia banned another
splinter group, the FFD. Legally, a party can be banned only by an appli-
cation of the Federal Government to the Constitutional Court, although
associations can be banned by Laender governments. Also on this day,
Joerg Petritsch, the lead singer of the pop group Stoerkraft, was sen-
tenced to two years suspended gaol for having shouted “Sieg Heil” to
his fans at gigs and for singing a song with the following lines “We are
Germany’s right [wing] police; we will clear up the streets.” On  May
, David Irving was fined DM . in Munich and banned from
speaking in Berlin on  May and in Sindelfingen on  May.

. Conclusion
There are, however, serious problems with such courses of action, as
the history of the Weimar demonstrates. First, measures to criminalize
and to suppress may backfire. They may be viewed as repression which
itself, in a democracy, can fuel further discontent. Second, it has been
argued by German political scientists and others that German fascism
has been taken too seriously by both German authorities and Germany’s
partners. This criticism was made before . Richard Stoess argues


that since German fascism today is not the same as it was in the s
and s, there is no point in seeking to suppress it: the only effect
such containment would have, would be the suppression of democratic
activity, which would undermine the values of German democracy.
The real threat to democracy, Stoess says, comes not from German
fascist violence but from the “dismantling of democratic rights.” Bans
are “are highly problematic in terms of democratic theory” and are just
as “ineffective as other administrative sanctions in overcoming the real
causes of right wing extremism.” Yet he concedes that banning does make
it harder for extremists to join right wing organizations and can there-
fore be justified.
The difficulty with Stoess’s liberal argument is that it uses democratic
theory to combat anti-democrats. It can be argued that the legal means
of the s failed, not because they were too harsh, but because they
were not harsh enough. Liberal democracy cannot allow its opponents
to utilize the benefits of free speech and free assembly as weapons to
overthrow democracy. It is impossible to ignore the lessons of the col-
lapse of the Weimar Republic, even though Bonn/Berlin is certainly not
Weimar. The situations are different in almost every respect, save the
presence of German fascism and the unleashing of German national
energies. Nor may we forget the fact that by  in Germany, a liberal
democracy could be quickly undermined by fascism. German fascism
has been able to exploit weaknesses in German political life, which were
in part the result of national unification in  and in part the out-
come of the failure of the great, democratic, German parties: a failure
not merely to act decisively against fascism, but also to develop a coher-
ent strategy for acting against it. Firm legal measures against fascist
activity are certainly called for; but so are measures designed to take on
the underlying forces militating in favor of fascism. Some of these forces
cannot ever be contained, let alone defeated. Germany remains the pris-
oner of its own history. Yet a re-statement is needed of the values of
liberal democracy, along with an explanation of why liberal democracy
provides an answer to the needs of the st century. The crazy notion of
ethnic superiority must be exposed. Fascism is not just a German prob-
lem; it was, and remains, a problem that is common to all European
political cultures. The whole of Europe needs to rise to the challenge
that it poses.

 Richard Stoess, Politics against Democracy: Right Wing Extremism in West Ger-
many (New York; Oxford: Berg, ), pp. , , –.


 Prelude to Disaster: The Evolution of Austrian Fascism
by Bruce F. Pauley

Austria’s importance in the history of fascism far outweighs its small

size: , square miles and . million people. Its Nazi Party was
founded nearly sixteen years earlier than its German counterpart which
Hitler joined in . The Austrian NSDAP was proportionately larger
than the German party until at least , and produced such luminar-
ies as Adolf Eichmann, who was put in charge of deporting Jews from
the entire Reich in , and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Nazis’
secret police after . Austrians comprised  percent of Eichmann’s
staff and were associated with half the murders of the Holocaust (of
whom , were Austrian Jews). Three-quarters of the commandants
of the Nazi extermination camps, as well as  percent of their staffs,
were Austrians.
The Austrian Nazis were not that country’s only fascists. Austria’s
location on the crossroads of Europe made it a veritable laboratory for
different types of fascism. Most of the Austrian Nazis looked north for
their inspiration and leadership and passionately favored a union or
Anschluss between Germany and Austria. But the equally fascist, if lesser
known, paramilitary Heimwehr, or Home Guard, looked to Mussolini
and Fascist Italy for financial and moral support. Most of its members
favored Austria’s independence.
Like most other European fascists, those in Austria claimed to repre-
sent a “movement of renewal,” which would reunite their socially divided
people into a “people’s community or Volksgemeinschaft. To this end they
developed a number of subsidiary organizations to appeal to both gen-
ders and a wide variety of occupational groups. Their strongest sup-
port, however, came from the middle class and peasantry. Again, like
fascists elsewhere, the Austrian fascists stressed the value of emotion and
sentiment over reason, of action instead of words, and of violence in
place of peace. They were passionately opposed to liberalism,
parliamentarianism, individualism, and especially to Marxism, which
included both socialism and communism. Austrian fascists, like nearly
all other fascists, were more or less anti-Semitic. Because Austrian fas-
cists deliberately appealed to a wide spectrum of social and political
groups, any specific program of action, which they might propose before
gaining power, was almost certain to destroy the tenuous bonds that
held their movement together. Consequently, positive programs which
stated clear principles were avoided; propaganda was directed instead


against nearly universally hated phenomena, such as the post-World War
I Paris Peace Treaties, crime in the streets, political corruption, economic
crises, and the Jews.

. The Historical Foundations of Austrian Fascism

All of the components which later were to constitute fascism could
be found prior to the First World War in the Habsburg Monarchy. In
Austria, as well as in other European countries, religious anti-Semitism
can be traced to the beginning of the Middle Ages, if not to Antiquity.
In its more modern, political, and especially racial form, however,
it dates only from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. By the
late s, Austrian university students, organized in so-called
Burschenschaften or fraternities, were already espousing a new creed of
racial anti-Semitism that was imported from Germany at the very time
when Jewish enrollments in Austrian universities were exploding. By
the eve of the First World War, Jews made up over a quarter of the stu-
dents at the University of Vienna and by , over  percent. Most
university students rejected religious anti-Judaism as reactionary and
unenlightened. Racial anti-Semitism seemed modern and scientific.
Moreover, the treatment of Jews as a separate race and not merely as
belonging to a different religion, would eliminate the opportunities for
social and economic advancement which Jews had enjoyed in Central
Europe when they converted to Christianity.
Universities were by no means the only source of modern, racial, and
political anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle Austria: another was the pan-
German politician, Georg von Schönerer. In , he advocated in the
so-called Linz Declaration “the removal of Jewish influence from all sec-
tions of public life.”
Why did Schönerer suddenly develop such a strong aversion to Jews?
The answer may lie in the broadening of the franchise in , which
Schönerer himself promoted. The new franchise tripled the number of
voters in Vienna. The primary beneficiaries were anti-capitalistic arti-
sans, who regarded big business and mass producing industries, where
Jews were highly overrepresented, as threats to their economic well-being.
The sudden rise of political anti-Semitism after  was a result of the
partial democratization of Austrian politics. Schönerer was not alone
among the politicians who now tried to appeal to the new voters through
anti-elitist, anti-individualist, and anti-intellectual demagoguery.
Schönerer, one of Hitler’s childhood heroes, thought of himself as a
German messiah. He was known as the Führer of his Pan-German Party,


and he called for the union of all German-speaking people. Schönerer
denounced Jews on “racial” grounds and demanded unconditional obe-
dience from his followers, an obedience which, later on, would also be
enjoined by all Austrian fascist leaders.
A quite different form of anti-Semitism, which emerged in late
nineteenth-century Austria, was the cultural type favored by the Viennese
mayor and founder of the Christian Social Party, Dr. Karl Lueger. Like
Schönerer, he used anti-Semitism to appeal to the same unstable groups:
artisans and university students, which forty years later would be greatly
overrepresented in the Austrian Nazi Party. Lueger also favored politi-
cal platforms that denounced the emancipation of Jews. For half a cen-
tury, Lueger’s old-fashioned brand of religious, cultural, and economic
anti-Semitism remained the integrating force of political Catholicism,
because it was far more in accord with Viennese traditions than was
Schönerer’s more modern racial anti-Semitism.
Together, Schönerer and Lueger demonstrated the appeal of anti-
Semitism to the masses, especially to lower middle-class artisans. To sug-
gest, however, that a straight line could be drawn between the
anti-Semitism of these two men and post-World War I Austrian fas-
cism would be a mistake. In , Lueger’s election coincided with the
return of prosperity that undermined the roots of economic anti-
Semitism. Lueger himself referred to anti-Semitism as “an excellent
means of getting ahead in politics, but after one [had] arrived, one
[could] not use it any longer␣ . . .” Consequently, during his thirteen
years in office, Jews suffered no discriminatory legislation, were faced
with no mass violence and experienced little physical abuse. Unfortu-
nately, one generation later, many Austrian Jews believed that Hitler
would follow in Lueger’s footsteps.
Another, completely different source of Austrian fascism lay in the
country’s authoritarian tradition and its imperfect democratization prior
to the World War. Except for the brief interlude during the Revolu-
tions of , Austria was an absolute monarchy up to the s. Finally,
in , after two failed constitutions, the Habsburg Monarchy was
divided into a Hungarian and Austrian dual state, with Austria receiv-
ing its first permanent constitution guaranteeing equal rights to all citi-
zens, including Jews. Even then, the franchise was severely restricted,
until it was broadened in  and most especially in , when it
included all males over the age of twenty-four. However, these actions

 Quoted in Robert A. Kann, A Study in Austrian Intellectual History: from the

Late Baroque to Romanticism (New York: Praeger, ), p. n.


served only to increase nationalism among the Monarchy’s dozen or so
ethnic groups. Nowhere was this national competition more obvious
than in the country’s Parliament or Reichsrat that was divided into
twenty-eight factions and seventeen major parties, all but two of which
limited their appeal to just one nationality. Collectively, the parties were
even less responsible than before the reform. The new Lower House
degenerated into little more than a circus, where the delegates tried to
drown each other out with shouts and noisemakers. The spectacle only
discredited parliamentary democracy, especially in the eyes of one of its
witnesses, Hitler. The state machinery was only able to continue with
the help of the well-oiled civil bureaucracy and a partial return of
Emperor Franz Joseph’s absolutistic powers, which he had surrendered
over four decades earlier.

. The Impact of the First World War

The Great War of – provided the final ingredients for the
rise of Austrian fascism by reviving anti-Semitism, inflaming national-
ism, and impoverishing the new republic that emerged from the ruins
of the Austrian Empire. The World War vastly accelerated the migra-
tion of Jews from the eastern and more backward provinces of the
Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy—Galicia and Bukovina—to Vienna,
where in a matter of months the city’s Jewish population increased by
as much as ,, or almost  percent. This population explosion,
consisting mainly of penniless peddlers, artisans, and cattle dealers, was
caused mostly by the Russian invasion of northeastern Austria at the
beginning of the war. The usually ultra-Orthodox Jewish inhabitants of
what was once (and became later) the southern part of Poland, were
well aware of the anti-Semitic policies of the Russian government and
fled their homelands in terror. Unfortunately, their arrival in Vienna
only aggravated the wartime shortages of housing, food, and fuel. By
–, most of the problems of the war and early postwar period
were being blamed on the Eastern Jews, even though by that time all
but about , of them had returned to their homelands, leaving the
city with , Jews or . percent of the population in .
It was between the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy in  and the
establishment of the “corporative state” by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfus
in  that anti-Semitism enjoyed its most luxuriant expressions. Free-
dom of speech and assembly also meant freedom to shout anti-Semitic
slogans, to defame “das Judentum” in the press, and to hold massive anti-
Semitic demonstrations. However much democracy may have made the


expression of anti-Semitic sentiments easier, it was not the primary cause
of anti-Semitism. On the contrary, anti-Semites were the enemies of
democracy. In general, Austrians who were the strongest supporters of
democracy were the least likely to be anti-Semitic, and in some cases
they were philo-Semitic. Those people who were the most fanatically
anti-Semitic were also the most likely to be arch-enemies of democracy,
and the most likely candidates for fascism.

. Crippled from Birth:

the Early Years of the First Austrian Republic

Although the new state bore a faint resemblance to the medieval

crownlands that belonged to the Habsburgs before , it was in real-
ity a new and, to most of its citizens, an unwelcome creation. For
German-Austrians, their state represented not liberation, but punish-
ment for losing the war. That the victorious Western powers regarded
the German-Austrians as a vanquished foe was only too apparent from
their treatment at the Paris Peace Conference. The Treaty of St. Germain,
which officially ended the war between Austria and the Allies, was far
harsher than the Treaty of Versailles. In contrast to Germany, which had
lost only about  percent of its territory and population, Austria was
forced to cede all but  percent of the territory of just the Austrian half
of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and all but  percent of its former
population. Austria lost not only all of its outlying and predominantly
non-German-speaking provinces, but also territories inhabited by about
. million German-Austrians, , of whom lived just across its
new boundaries.
Even though nearly every Austrian was adversely affected by the
breakup of the Habsburg Monarchy, the middle class was by far the
hardest-hit social group, because it had made up the largest proportion
of civil and military servants in the Empire. An administrative person-
nel, which had been too large even for the  million people living in
just the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy, now served a state with
only . million inhabitants. Thousands of surplus civil servants were
dismissed as a condition for Austria receiving a loan of $ million
from the British, French, and Czechoslovakian governments in .
Thus, one of the major ingredients of a successful democracy—a strong,
prosperous, and self-confident middle class—was missing in Austria
between the world wars. The proletarianization of the middle class,
or at least the fear of becoming proletarian, which was aggravated by
hyper-inflation during the early ls and the depression of the s,


made the Austrian bourgeoisie vulnerable to political extremism and
National Socialism.
Difficult as its economic problems were, an even worse dilemma for
the young Austrian Republic was the repudiation of its very existence
by the majority of its citizens. It was this rejection, more than any other
factor, that later aided the Nazis’ cause. The heart and soul of the Austrian
Nazis’ program was their desire for a union with Germany, something
which was forbidden by the Treaty of St. Germain and the Treaty of
Versailles. Far from creating the issue, however, or even monopolizing
it, the Nazis merely succeeded in exploiting its value more effectively
than any other Austrian party.
Major flaws in the new Austrian constitution of  also weakened
democracy. It contributed to the growth of fascism by decentralizing
the country and according the federal states a wide degree of local auton-
omy. Vienna was separated from Lower Austria and became one of the
nine states. Its large working-class population enabled the Social Demo-
cratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) to dominate the government and to enact
Western Europe’s most advanced social welfare program, which was
largely paid for by the taxes of Vienna’s middle and upper classes.
The bourgeoisie, already stunned by the passing of the Monarchy
and its own relative impoverishment and unemployment, were horri-
fied that the dreaded Socialists were now in positions of authority. But
what alarmed them still more was the Social Democrats’ radical rheto-
ric. In Austria, in contrast to most other postwar European countries, a
split between Socialists and Communists, for all practical purposes, never
occurred, making the Social Democrats the most leftist of any party
west of the Soviet Union. Most of the radicals stayed in the SDAP, by
being appeased with a large dose of hard-line Marxist slogans about class
warfare and the eventual dictatorship of the proletariat. Although the
party was more moderate in its actual practices than its propaganda sug-
gested, its dogmatism and rhetoric alienated the bourgeoisie and peas-
antry. Its elaborate, tight, and almost totalitarian organization found an
admirer and follower before , in the young Hitler. The Socialists’
strident advocacy of democracy and republicanism helped the anti-
Socialists become anti-democratic and anti-republican. Perhaps  per-
cent of the party’s intellectual leadership was, moreover, of Jewish origins,
in part because no other major Austrian party would accept Jews in lead-
ership positions. Anti-Socialists had, thus, a new excuse to fear and to
hate the party.
Proportional representation in the National Assembly, the Lower
House of the new Austrian Parliament, also hampered the consolidation

of democracy. The voter was required to cast his ballot for a single party
list of candidates selected by the party chairman; he was denied an oppor-
tunity to vote for individual politicians. Proportional representation gave
the political parties so much power that many frustrated voters, unable
either to choose or to oust individual politicians, began calling Austria
a Parteienstaat (party state). Change required a reformation of the con-
stitution. But only the political parties had the power to do this; and
they were the very groups that profited from the status quo. Many oppo-
nents of the system believed that the only solution to this impasse was
a dictatorship.

. The Rise of the Austrian Nazi Party

The Austrian Nazi Party eventually became the most dangerous oppo-
nent of Austrian democracy. Like anti-Semitism, its roots and political
values were well established before the First World War. After the turn
of the century, the dissolution of Georg von Schönerer’s Pan-German
Party paved the way for the founding of a new German nationalist party
in –. The German Workers’ Party was in large measure a prod-
uct of a fierce political and economic rivalry between Czechs and
German-speaking people in northern Bohemia, which was still part of
the Habsburg Monarchy. The German workers, displaced by relatively
unskilled and lower-paid Czechs, quickly developed a burning hatred
of their rivals. By , the party had expanded into the provinces of
Upper Austria, Salzburg, and the German-speaking part of the South
Tyrol, all areas that included strong ethnic clashes. In April  the
party’s name was extended, for propaganda purposes, to German
National Socialist Workers’ Party, a slightly different arrangement of
words from that of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party of
Germany, which was founded in January .
Striking similarities between the pre-war Austrian Nazis and the post-
war German Nazis may be more than simply coincidental. Both were
anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-Marxist, and anti-Semitic. Even the ter-
minology and the militancy of the two parties were much the same. As
Hitler confessed in a speech in Salzburg in August , “I am ashamed
to say that not until today, after so many years, the same movement
which began in German-Austria in  has just begun to gain a foot-
ing in Germany.”

 Quoted in Georg Franz-Willing, Die Hitlerbewegung; Der Ursprung, –

(Hamburg: R. von Decker’s Verlag), p. . Emphasis by Franz-Willing.


 The disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy, a disaster for the
German-Austrians in general, was particularly devastating for the
Austrian Nazis. Roughly three-quarters of their membership was cut off
in the new Republic of Czechoslovakia. Consequently, the whole decade
of the ls saw the Austrian Nazis struggling to build a sizeable mem-
bership. Yet until  or , they were far larger on a per capita basis
than their brother party in Germany, with which they were affiliated
until  through a National Socialist Bureau of the German Language
Territory with its headquarters in Vienna. In the first postwar Austrian
elections of February , the Nazis won just . percent of the vote.
Aided by runaway inflation and a sharp increase in anti-Semitism, how-
ever, the Nazis managed to triple their membership to , between
August  and August of the following year.
Philosophical differences between the younger and more radical mem-
bers and the older, mostly trade unionist members who favored a demo-
cratically-organized party came to a head in May , when several
local groups in Vienna, consisting of younger members, were expelled
after refusing to recognize the leadership of the democratically-elected
Karl Schulz. Two hundred of the dissidents responded to the expulsion
by founding the NSDAP (Hitlerverein) on  May and subordinated
themselves directly to Hitler. Efforts by Schulz to head off a confronta-
tion and to work out a modus vivendi with Hitler gained him nothing
but insults when the two men met in Munich in , and again in
Passau (on the German side of the Austro-German border) in August
. At the Passau meeting, Hitler demanded “unconditional loyalty”
from the “Schulz Party.” Austria, he said contemptuously, was nothing
more than a German Gau (district) to which he would send a
Reichskommissar (deputy) and later name a leader. This was an ominous
preview of what was in store for Austria as a whole in .
Although there were two attempts to reunite the Austrian Nazis, they
remained divided until the dissolution of the Schulz faction in . In
the interval they fought like mortal enemies until September , when
the Hitler Movement gained the upper hand after Hitler’s startling elec-
toral success in Germany. The Nazi vote then increased from ,
to . million. Until that time, although both sides claimed to be by far
the larger group, they were about equally weak; the Hitlerians, for
example, were able to win only , votes in the parliamentary elec-
tions of April  and gained no parliamentary mandates.
After the split among the Austrian Nazis, Hitler provided his follow-
ers with ideological guidance. He, however, was prohibited from enter-
ing Austrian territory and was too preoccupied with German affairs to

furnish the Austrian Nazis with practical day-to-day leadership. The
return of a modest degree of prosperity between  and mid-
dampened anti-Semitic passions and proved detrimental to both Nazi
factions. Therefore, the late s were a time of frustration and stag-
nation for both wings of the Austrian Nazi Party.

. The Austrian Heimwehr

Although the Nazis eventually became the most important Austrian

fascists, they were by no means the only ones. The second most impor-
tant group was the Austrian Heimwehr or Home Guard. The Heimwehr
was much younger than the Austrian NSDAP. A purely postwar phenom-
enon, like the Austrian Nazis and many other fascist movements, it origi-
nated in an area with extreme ethnic conflicts. The Heimwehr’s early
strength occurred in Carinthia and Styria, where in  it fought
Yugoslav territorial ambitions. Almost from the beginning, however, and
increasingly as the external danger waned, the Heimwehr and other right-
wing paramilitary formations in Austria concentrated their energies
against the internal “Marxist threat.”
The modest size of the Republic’s army, which remained well below
the ,-man maximum imposed by the Treaty of St. Germain and
by the Socialist war minister, Julius Deutsch, prompted many veterans
to continue their military pursuits outside the regular army in the
Heimwehr. They were joined by peasants, lower-middle-class shopkeep-
ers, teachers, and other professional people in rural areas, along with
aristocrats, who were still angry over being declassed by the Republic.
In October , socialist participation in the Austrian government
ended, and in , subsequent to the reestablishment of the currency
and several years of hyper-inflation, the Austrian economy began to im-
prove. A degree of stability returned to Austrian politics. No longer pro-
posing major unifying issues or offering an effective leader, in early ,
the Heimwehr divided into a clerical faction that drew its greatest strength
from the more rural states of Upper Austria and the Tyrol; and a radical
pan-German wing, concentrated in Styria, Vienna, and Lower Austria.
After barely surviving the peaceful middle years of the s the two
wings of the Austrian Heimwehr were revived by two events that alarmed
the Austrian middle class. In , the Social Democrats created their
official “Linz Program,” which reaffirmed the possibility (under highly
unlikely circumstances) of a “proletarian dictatorship” to defend democ-
racy. Alarm changed to panic the next year following a July uprising in
Vienna, where workers rioted and set fire to the Palace of Justice after


the acquittal of a group of Front Fighters (another right-wing veterans’
organization concentrated in Vienna) accused of murder. The nation-
wide general strike, called by the Social Democrats in the aftermath of
the riot, was quickly squelched by several provincial Heimwehr units,
above all by the one in Styria. The Heimwehr could now claim to have
saved Austria from “Bolshevism,” especially because the Nazi Party was
too divided to exploit the situation. The grateful bourgeoisie soon rushed
to join the Heimwehr’s ranks.
The Heimwehr’s unity was restored in October  when Richard
Steidle and another lawyer, the Styrian Dr. Walter Pfrimer, began serv-
ing as its co-leaders. The movement grew rapidly during the next two
years and contributed to the Nazis’ lackluster growth rate. The swift
progress of the Heimwehr served to mask serious internal problems.
Neither Steidle nor Pfrimer was effective as a leader. Steidle, the leader
of the more moderate, clerical wing of the Heimwehr and a talented
speaker, was popular with his own Tyrolean followers. But he had a repu-
tation for extreme laziness and indifference. Pfrimer, who led the radi-
cal, pan-German wing was overweight, balding, nearly deaf, and a poor
public speaker.
In , the Heimwehr began receiving financial assistance from
Mussolini in exchange for pledges to overthrow the Austrian govern-
ment and to establish a right-wing, pro-Italian dictatorship, which would
renounce any claim to the South Tyrol, annexed by Italy in . This
alliance with Mussolini was just one of the issues which divided the
Austrian Heimwehr. In the spectrum between the demagogic, religious,
but usually non-racial anti-Semitic values of the Christian Social Party,
to which the majority of the Heimwehr belonged, and the racial, some-
times violent, anti-Semitism of the Nazis, the Heimwehr stood squarely
in the middle, with one foot in each camp. Steidle’s followers tended to
prefer the more traditional, Catholic form of anti-Semitism that
eschewed racial anti-Semitism. Steidle himself claimed that the move-
ment was not anti-Semitic, but that it merely opposed Jewish Marxists
and destructive Eastern Jews. Patriotic Jews were welcome comrades
against Marxism. The Pfrimer wing, however, was much less equivocal
about anti-Semitism. On numerous occasions, Pfrimer said that Jews
ought to be treated as a foreign race, and he complained about Steidle’s
more moderate views on the Jewish question.
As the fear of Marxism again began to dissipate in the late s, the
Heimwehr movement seemed to require a more “positive” program than
mere anti-Marxism and anti-Semitism to maintain its raison d’être.
Although Heimwehr leaders began formulating specifically fascist

objectives as early as , it was not until May  that they made an
almost official avowal of typically fascist principles in the notorious
“Korneuburg Oath.” Announced by Richard Steidle, the Oath
denounced “Western” democracy, liberal capitalism, and political par-
ties. It demanded the establishment of economic corporations (similar
to those in Italy), a “new German national outlook,” and the creation
of a Heimwehr dictatorship. Although there was no overt mention of
Jews, references to serving the German Volk had anti-Semitic overtones.
Nevertheless, the Oath also included an apparent compromise with the
Heimwehr’s pan-German wing which would have preferred endorsement
of an Anschluss.
The Oath marked both the peak of the Heimwehr’s power and its
drift toward fascism on the one hand, and the beginning of its decline
on the other. It was far too radical for the more clerical members of the
movement and yet not radical enough to please the pan-German fac-
tion. The Oath, along with the controversial election of the playboy
prince, Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg as federal leader in September ,
and Starhemberg’s decision to enter the parliamentary elections of
November , reopened the old schism between the clerical and pan-
German wings. The elections were disastrous, because the Heimwehr
captured only , votes and eight deputies, thus falling far short
of its members’ unrealistic expectations.
Walter Pfrimer, who briefly replaced the discredited Starhemberg as
federal leader in May , saw a “March on Vienna” (in the style of
Mussolini’s March on Rome in ) as the only way to revive the
Heimwehr’s flagging fortunes and to gain dictatorial power. The Pfrimer
Putsch in September turned out to be a fiasco (in many respects, resem-
bling Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of ), because the other provincial
Heimwehr leaders refused to join the escapade. Failing to achieve power
through the ballot box or violence, and unable to unite behind a char-
ismatic leader, many frustrated members of the Heimwehr now became
receptive to the call of Nazism.

. The Austrian Nazi Party at Its Zenith, –

The spring of  proved to be one of the major turning points in

Nazi-Heimwehr relations and during the whole history of the First
Austrian Republic. At a time when there were about , unem-
ployed workers in Austria, or well over a third of all workers, the Nazis
made impressive gains in local elections, held in three federal states and
several municipalities in April, by amassing , votes or over


 percent of those cast. In Vienna alone, their vote jumped from ,
in  to ,, a year and a half later.
The Nazis’ success combined with the recent electoral failure of the
Heimwehr made the Austrian Nazi Party irresistible in the eyes of the
pan-German wing of the Heimwehr, with its center in Styria. For these
people, the Heimwehr’s position on anti-Semitism and the Anschluss was
simply too wishy-washy. Whereas the anti-Semitism of most Heimwehr
members resembled the relatively easygoing anti-Judaism of Karl Lueger,
no such “compromises” could be found within the Nazi ideology. On
the Anschluss as well, the Heimwehr’s clerical wing was at best lukewarm,
whereas the pan-German wing adamantly advocated a union with
Germany. Moreover, in January , when the anti-clerical and anti-
Socialist Nazis came to power in Germany, the Christian Socials and
Social Democrats dropped the Anschluss from their party programs, thus
leaving the Nazis as the only major Austrian party still unequivocally
favoring the union. Anyone regarding the merger of the two German-
speaking countries as Austria’s most important objective had little choice
but to join the Nazis. The Styrian section of the Heimwehr allied itself
to the Nazis in the spring of , a move which, during the remainder
of  and , was soon followed by similar actions by other pan-
German and anti-Semitic groups.

. Fascism and the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg Regime

When Hitler came to power in Germany, the Austrian Nazis were
supremely confident that it was only a question of time, perhaps just a
few months, until they too were in power. They met unexpected resis-
tance, however, in the person of the Chancellor Dollfuss, who had been
appointed in May . As a practicing Catholic and a patriotic Austrian,
he had no desire to see his country swallowed up by the anti-Catholic
Nazi regime in Germany. Following a series of Nazi attacks against Jews
and government property, he outlawed the party on  June . In
early October , he also suppressed anti-Semitic violence at the
University of Vienna, albeit after having been subjected to pressure by
the American minister to Austria.
Despite Dollfuss’s resolute opposition to both Nazism and anti-
Semitism, there were some definite fascist-like characteristics of the
Dollfuss government and that of his successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg.
Dollfuss and Schuschnigg emphasized what Dollfuss called the “good
and healthy” values in National Socialism, by incorporating some aspects
of National Socialism and Italian Fascism, in order to “take the wind


out of the Nazis’ sails.” In March , Dollfuss allowed the Austrian
Parliament to “dissolve itself,” after a ridiculous dispute involving vot-
ing procedures. The Social Democratic Party was outlawed after an
uprising by Socialist extremists in Linz. On  April , the Austrian
chancellor, aping Hitler’s pseudo-legality, insured that a new authori-
tarian constitution was confirmed by the Christian Social and Heimwehr
members of the old Parliament. This constitution, never fully imple-
mented, provided for a highly centralized state possessing few powers,
either for the state parliaments, or for a new federal assembly that rep-
resented seven fascist-style economic corporations. The assembly could
not initiate or even debate legislation. Under the new regime, only a
single party was tolerated, the Fatherland Front, which, with its huge
rallies and mass display of flags, resembled fascist parties in other coun-
tries. The Fatherland Front, however, never became genuinely popular
in Austria, even though it included a nominal membership of over two
million. Obviously it was created from the top down, rather than from
the bottom up, as was the case with the German Nazi and the Italian
Fascist Parties. Dollfuss and his successor did go so far as to suppress
democratic elections, as well as freedom of the press and speech. They
established detention areas for their political enemies, although these
camps were a far cry from the concentration camps in Germany.
The differences between the values of the “authoritarian” regimes of
Dollfuss and Schuschnigg and those of Hitler and Mussolini were prob-
ably more significant than the similarities. Neither man persecuted Jews
or Catholics, although they tolerated anti-Semitic articles in newspa-
pers. They almost certainly did not intend to establish a permanent dic-
tatorship. They saw their governments, instead, as a kind of necessary
evil, until the twin challenges of Marxism and National Socialism could
be contained. There was no talk about making the new system last for a
“thousand years.”
Neither Dollfuss nor Schuschnigg, moreover, fit the mold of a typi-
cal fascist or totalitarian dictator. Both men were sincere, practicing
Catholics. They did not reveal the slightest interest in military glory
(even if Austria had possessed the capacity); nor is there any evidence
that they lusted for sheer power. They wanted a government strong
enough to subdue Nazi radicals (and Socialists), but mild enough to
appeal to the more moderate Nazis, as well as to Jews. They succeeded
in retaining the loyalty of the latter, but not the former. Their dictator-
ship can be described, at most, as only semi-fascist.


 . The Triumph of Austrian-Fascism

The Austrian Nazis, frustrated by their prohibition by Dollfuss,

attempted to come to power through a Putsch in July , only to fail
again when Mussolini and the Western democracies, outraged by the
murder of Dollfuss, finally showed signs of resistance. Another chance
did not appear before March , when Hitler felt that German rear-
mament had proceeded to the point where he could take stronger action
against Austria without fear of foreign intervention. In February, Hitler
met Chancellor Schuschnigg at Berchtesgaden and browbeat him into
appointing two pro-Nazis to his cabinet, including Arthur Seyss-Inquart,
as Minister of the Interior in charge of police. Encouraged by
Schuschnigg’s weakening position, the Nazis of Styria, many of whom
were former members of the Styrian Heimwehr, revolted and made Styria
a virtual Nazi province. These developments forced Schuschnigg to make
a desperate attempt to save his country’s independence through an ill-
fated plebiscite. Sensing an embarrassing outcome, Hitler unleashed the
Wehrmacht, and the rest, as they say, is history.
After the Anschluss, the Austrian Nazis were no longer restrained by
the Austrian government. They created an anti-Jewish rampage far worse
than anything yet seen in Germany proper. Jewish stores were looted.
Jews were robbed on the streets of Vienna, and their apartments were
invaded and plundered. In short, Jews were humiliated in every con-
ceivable way by their Nazi tormentors. Within a few hours or at most a
few days, all Jewish actors, musicians, and journalists had lost their jobs.
By mid-June , just three months after the Anschluss, Jews had already
been more thoroughly purged from public life in Austria than in the
five years following Hitler’s takeover of power in Germany.
Why was this Austrian outburst of anti-Semitism so much more
extreme than anything yet seen in Germany proper? The most likely
answer lies in Austria’s location as a Grenzland or borderland. Most of
its provinces were located next to states with non-German nationali-
ties, which heightened the Austrians’ sense of their own ethnicity. (The
same anti-ethnicity can now be seen with horrifying consequences, in
the former Yugoslavia.) Many Austrian Nazis themselves, like the exter-
mination camp commandant, Odilo Globocnigg, and six of the seven
Austrian Gauleiters, possessed non-German names or non-Aryan fea-
tures, which made them all the more eager to prove to their Reich
German superiors that their German nationalism was second to none
in its fanaticism.


 . Fascist Values in Post-World War II Austria

The end of the Second World War saw the practical end of Austrian
fascism. Already in , the Austrian Heimwehr had been legally, if not
practically, prohibited by Chancellor Schuschnigg, and at the end of
the war the Allies outlawed the Nazi Party. Nevertheless, a few rem-
nants of fascism and its values have survived up to the present day in
the Second Austrian Republic.
Many of the , former Austrian Nazis were eventually absorbed
by the two major postwar parties, the Austrian People’s Party—in many
respects the successor to the Christian Social Party, except much less
clerical and right-wing—and the Social Democrats. In , other
ex-Nazis, disgruntled at their temporary exclusion from the franchise,
founded their own party, the League of Independents (Verband der
Unabhängigen or VDU). For most of its members, National Socialism
was a dead issue, with one exception: the party’s avowal of the unity of
the German Volk. In , however, when the VDU further declared
that Austria was “a German state␣ . . . its policy must never be directed
against another German state and must serve the entire German Volk,”
it suffered a crushing defeat in the next elections.
In more recent years the Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei
Österreichs), the successor to the VDU, led by the charismatic former
governor of Carinthia, Jörg Haider, has also displayed a few fascist val-
ues, especially an espousal of German nationalism. However, a plebi-
scite he promoted in , which was aimed at stopping immigration,
won only a disappointing , votes, a little more than half the
, he had predicted. Although Haider’s nationalism is directed at
foreigners in general, anti-Semites have gravitated to his party. No fewer
than . percent of its members, who were polled in , expressed
hard-core anti-Semitic views, as compared to only  percent of the
People’s Party and . percent of the Social Democrats.
In general, all the postwar polls have also revealed that anti-Semitism
is substantially stronger in Austria than in Germany, France, or the
United States. About  percent of all Austrians, according to a poll
conducted in , articulated at least some anti-Semitic views; about
 to  percent had fairly strong prejudices against Jews; and about
 to  percent could be described as hard-core anti-Semites. Neverthe-
less, one especially encouraging sign is that anti-Semitism is weakest
 Max E. Riedlsperger, The Lingering Shadow of Hitler: The Austrian Independent
Party Movement since  (New York: Columbia University Press, ),
pp. , .


among the youngest generation and intellectuals. The Waldheim affair
in , although it brought latent anti-Jewish prejudices into the open,
did not substantially change these figures. It was followed by a massive
protest against anti-Semitism.
It is extremely improbable that Austria will ever experience again the
passionate, violent, and nearly universal anti-Semitism that existed
between  and ; likewise, it is unlikely that anything approach-
ing the fanatical fascism of the inter-war years is likely to reappear in
the future. Almost none of the conditions that made anti-Semitism so
virulent in the First Republic still exists today. Secularism has largely
eliminated religious and cultural anti-Semitic values, and the decima-
tion of the Jewish population has removed the causes of economic anti-
Semitism. Racial anti-Semitism has been discredited by its close
association with Nazi atrocities. What remains in Austria are old stereo-
types, especially those concerning alleged Jewish financial power and
control over the mass media. Nevertheless, there is reason to hope that
with education, these views will gradually disappear, although the pro-
cess is likely to be a lengthy one.
If the roots of anti-Semitism—one of the most powerful antivalues
in fascism—have been greatly weakened in postwar Austria, the same
can not be said of one of the major aims of the Austrian fascists: a union
with Germany. The Anschluss had been fostered after  by the nearly
universally held belief, even by people like the Christian Socialists who
were anything but pro-German, that Austria was simply not viable
as an independent state. To some extent this conviction became a self-
fulfilling prophecy. Today, Austria is one of the most prosperous coun-
tries in the world, and even the Anschluss of East and West Germany in
 did not find an echo in the Alpine state.
Finally, most of the passion and ideological dogmatism that divided
Austria into three bitterly opposed camps—Catholics, Socialists, and
pan-German nationalists—is missing in the Second Republic. The
People’s Party has given up its close ties to the Catholic church, and the
Church has renounced an active role in politics. The Social Democrats
have given up their radical Marxism in favor of a left-of-center welfarism.
Only in the Freedom Party can one find significant remnants of both
pan-German nationalism and anti-Semitism, but even there they are
held only by a minority of its members.


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