Chapter 11: History: Rise of Dictatorships
On the morning of 28 October 1922, a decree lay on a desk in Rome, waiting for one signature. For two days, columns of Fascist volunteers in black shirts had been moving towards the capital by road and by rail. The Prime Minister of Italy, Luigi Facta, had already decided how to answer them. He had drawn up a proclamation of martial law, which would place the city under military control and allow the army to stop the marchers. Facta believed the troops in the capital could hold them. All the proclamation needed was the signature of the head of state, King Victor Emmanuel III. The King refused to sign. Instead, he sent for Benito Mussolini, the leader of the Fascist Party, who had stayed behind in Milan. He asked Mussolini to form a government. Within days Mussolini was Prime Minister of Italy — appointed by the King, under the ordinary rules of the constitution, without a single fresh vote being cast. Historians still argue about why the King refused. Some point to his fear of a civil war between Italians. Some point to doubts about whether the army would fire on the marchers. Some point to politicians who believed Mussolini could be tamed once he was inside the government. What is not in dispute is the shape of what happened. Europe’s first Fascist government did not break down the door. It was invited in.
Diagram
Fig. 11.0-1 Caption: Fascist columns in black shirts converged on Rome in October 1922. Brief: Source an archival photograph of Fascist squads marching in Rome, October 1922; label the year and the city; show the scale of the column rather than any individual face.
11.1 Europe After The First World War
The First World War ended in November 1918. In the decade that followed, from 1919 to 1929, democratic government appeared to be spreading across Europe. New republics were founded, new constitutions were written, and parliaments were elected by large numbers of voters for the first time.
That spread did not hold. Within a few years, several of these young democracies gave way to dictatorship — a form of government in which power is held by one person or one party, and the rulers are not answerable to the voters. Italy, Germany, Russia and Spain each ended the period under a single ruling party, though by very different routes.
This chapter asks how that happened in two of those countries. It looks at why Fascism rose in Italy, why Nazism rose in Germany, and what the two ideologies had in common.
11.1.1 Why Democracy Lost Ground
The war left Europe poorer than it had been in 1914. Trade routes were broken, currencies had lost value, and governments owed enormous war debts. Millions of soldiers came home to countries that had no work for them.
Ordinary people had been promised that victory would be worth the cost. When the promise was not kept, the elected governments of the day were blamed for it. Hardship became a political argument.
The peace settlement added to the anger, and not only among the defeated. Some countries on the winning side also felt that the treaties had given them less than they were owed. In both cases the resentment was aimed at the politicians who had negotiated the peace.
There was a second fear at work. In 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had brought to power a government committed to communism — the belief that private ownership of land and factories should be ended and that property should be held in common. Communist parties now existed across Europe, and property owners watched them with alarm.
Meanwhile, many of the new parliaments were badly placed to answer any of this. Where no single party won a majority, the country was run by a coalition government — a government formed by several parties together, none of which can rule on its own. Coalitions of this kind rose and fell quickly, and their policies changed with them.
The result was a public argument that ran through the 1920s. Some writers and intellectuals in these years argued openly that democracy was too slow and too divided to handle a crisis, and that a strong leader would do better. That argument was not settled by evidence; it was settled by events.
11.1.2 What A Totalitarian Dictatorship Was
Dictatorship was not new in Europe. What appeared after the First World War was something the older word did not quite cover, and historians describe it as a totalitarian state — a state that claims authority over the whole of a citizen’s life, and not merely over public order.
An older autocrat wanted obedience. A totalitarian regime wanted more than that. It wanted the citizen’s work, leisure, schooling, reading and belief brought into line with the aims of the State.
The methods followed from the aim. One party was allowed and the rest were banned; newspapers, books and films were censored; a secret police watched for disloyalty; and mass rallies and youth organisations were used to draw people in rather than merely keep them quiet.
Mussolini gave this idea its shortest statement. Speaking in Milan in 1925, three years after he had taken office, he set out what he thought the relationship between the State and everything else should be.
The sentence is a claim, not a description. A speech records what a leader chose to say in public, and a slogan is designed to be repeated rather than tested. Historians who study Fascist Italy in detail find that the State’s control over the countryside, the Church and the old civil service was always less complete than the slogan suggests.
Scholars also disagree about how far the regimes of Italy, Germany, Russia and Spain belong in a single group at all. They shared a hostility to opposition, but they differed in what they promised, in whom they attacked, and in who paid for them. It is worth holding that disagreement in mind through the rest of this chapter.
11.2 Fascism In Italy: The Idea And Its Setting
Before we can ask why Fascism rose in Italy, we need to know two things: what the word stood for, and what kind of country Italy was when the movement began.
11.2.1 What The Word ‘Fascism’ Meant
The name came from the Italian word fascio, meaning a bundle, a group or a league. Political groups in Italy had used the word for years before Mussolini did.
Behind fascio stood an older image. In ancient Rome, an official’s attendants carried the fasces — a bundle of wooden rods bound tightly around an axe. The rods stood for the unity that made a bundle unbreakable, and the axe for the magistrate’s power to punish. Mussolini’s followers took the fasces as their emblem, and the movement took its name from it.
The emblem is worth looking at closely, because it carried the argument in a single object.
Diagram
Fig. 11.2-1 Caption: The Roman fasces was a bundle of rods bound around an axe. Brief: Draw the fasces upright — wooden rods bound with a spiral cord, an axe head projecting from one side. Label the rods, the binding and the axe. Keep it plain, with no party marking.
From this the word took its political meaning. Fascism is a system of government in which power is concentrated in one leader and one party, the State is held to be supreme over the individual, and organised opposition is not permitted.
The emblem is therefore evidence of intention rather than of practice. The fasces had been a Roman symbol for centuries before 1919, and it still appears in the emblems of other states with no Fascist meaning at all. A symbol tells you what a movement wanted people to believe about it; only its actions tell you what it did.
11.2.2 Italy Before The Fascists
Italy was a young country in 1919. Its separate states had been joined into one kingdom between 1860 and 1870, under King Victor Emmanuel II, within the lifetime of people still living.
The new kingdom was a monarchy with an elected parliament, but it was unevenly developed. Factories and railways spread through the north, while much of the south stayed poor and agricultural, and hundreds of thousands of Italians emigrated in search of work.
Italy had also come late to overseas empire. It held Eritrea and Somaliland in East Africa and took Libya from the Ottoman Empire in 1911–12, but its holdings were small beside those of Britain and France. Many Italians felt that their country was treated as a lesser power in Europe.
That feeling shaped Italy’s entry into the First World War. The country joined the Allies in 1915 after being promised territory in the peace that would follow, and the war then cost it heavily in lives and in money.
The Vote And The Parliament
Italy’s parliament was old, but its electorate was new. The vote had been restricted to a small propertied minority for most of the kingdom’s life, and only in the years around the war was it widened to almost all adult men.
The election of 1919 was the first held on that wide franchise. It was fought under proportional representation, a system that shares out seats in proportion to the votes each party wins.
The immediate effect was a parliament in which no party could rule alone. The Socialists and the newly formed Popular Party held large blocs of seats and would not work with each other. Governments were formed, lost their majority and fell, one after another, between 1919 and 1922.
By 1922, then, Italy was a constitutional monarchy with a wide franchise, a divided parliament, an angry body of ex-soldiers and a king who still held real reserve powers. Every cause discussed in the next section acted on that particular country.
11.2.3 What The Fascists Believed
The Fascists did not hide their aims, and it is better to set them out plainly than to guess at them. Their central claim was that the State comes first and the individual second, because the individual receives all rights from the State.
The rest followed from that claim: (a) Democracy was rejected outright. Fascists argued that counting heads produced weak and divided governments, and that a nation was not simply the majority of its people. (b) One party and one leader were held to be enough. Progress, they said, would come from a single leader whose will expressed the will of the nation. (c) Individual rights and freedoms were to give way to the interests of the State wherever the two conflicted. (d) Every group in society — industrialists, landowners, workers, peasants and artisans — was to be brought under the control of the party and the State, so that class conflict would end. (e) Nationalism, the belief that loyalty to one’s own nation stands above all other loyalties, was to be the strongest bond in public life — stronger than class, region or party. (f) Imperialism, the policy of extending a country’s power over other territories and peoples, was accepted openly, and war was treated as a proper instrument of national interest.
Two of these deserve a second look. The promise to end class conflict was made to workers and to employers at the same time, and it was kept by banning independent trade unions and strikes rather than by settling the quarrel between them.
The rejection of majority rule was equally double-edged. It allowed the Fascists to argue that a movement could speak for the nation without ever winning a majority of its votes — which was exactly their position when they took office.
11.3 Causes For The Rise Of Fascism In Italy
No single cause turned Italy into a Fascist state. A disappointing peace, a wrecked economy, a divided parliament, a frightened propertied class and a determined leader all acted together, and each made the next one easier.
The order in which they arrived matters as much as the list itself. Follow the sequence in the timeline as you read the causes below.
11.3.1 Discontentment With The Treaty Of Versailles
Italy had not entered the war out of loyalty to the Allies. It joined them in 1915 in exchange for a secret promise of territory — land on its northern border, the port of Trieste, the Istrian peninsula and a stretch of the Dalmatian coast across the Adriatic Sea.
At the peace conference in Paris, Italy received the northern districts of Trentino and South Tyrol, together with Trieste and Istria. It did not receive most of the Dalmatian coast, which went to the new state of Yugoslavia, and it received no part of the German or Turkish colonial empires.
Measured against the losses of the war, this looked to many Italians like defeat dressed as victory. The phrase vittoria mutilata, ‘the mutilated victory’, spread through Italian politics after 1919, popularised by the nationalist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.
The political effect was larger than the territorial one. Returning soldiers were told that politicians had wasted their sacrifice at the conference table, and the Fascists made that grievance their own from the start.
11.3.2 The Economic Crisis
The war had drained Italy. It had been paid for by borrowing, and the debts remained after the fighting stopped, while much of the industry built up for war production had nothing to make in peacetime.
Prices rose steeply. Inflation — a general rise in prices, which reduces what the same money will buy — wiped out the value of savings and fixed salaries, hitting clerks, teachers and pensioners hardest.
At the same time, soldiers were demobilised in huge numbers into a country with no work for them. Trade and commerce were slow to recover, unemployment spread, and food grains were often in short supply.
Hardship of this kind does not by itself produce dictatorship. What it produces is a large body of people with nothing to lose by supporting a movement that promises to overturn the existing order.
11.3.3 Political Instability
Italy’s parliament, elected on the wide new franchise, could not form a stable government. No party held a majority, and the two largest blocs — the Socialists and the Popular Party — refused to combine.
One coalition followed another between 1919 and 1922. Each had a different set of policies, none lasted long enough to carry them through, and the country was left without any settled direction.
These governments then faced the hardest years of all. Strikes, factory occupations and street violence ran through 1920, 1921 and 1922, and ministries that could not agree among themselves proved unable to deal with them.
The Fascists used this failure as their main argument. They did not need to prove that their own methods worked; they only needed to point at a parliament that visibly did not.
11.3.4 Class Conflict And The Fear Of Communism
The sharpest conflict of these years was not between parties but between classes. Across continental Europe the question was whether governments and economies would stay in the hands of the old propertied families or pass to the less privileged majority.
Italian workers and peasants had been told during the war that their sacrifices would be rewarded. When the reward did not come, they acted. In 1919 and 1920 — years Italians remember as the ‘two red years’ — workers occupied factories in the northern industrial cities and peasants took over land from large estates.
Behind these actions stood two related movements. Socialism is the belief that the major industries and land should be owned or controlled by society as a whole, so that wealth is shared more evenly. Communism, as you have seen, went further, and the Bolshevik success in Russia in 1917 showed that it could be done.
To industrialists and landowners, the occupations looked like the first stage of an Italian revolution. Many of them began to fund the Fascist squads, whose blackshirted volunteers broke strikes, attacked socialist offices and drove elected socialist councils out of town halls.
The squads were rarely stopped. Police and magistrates often stood aside, and some officials sympathised with them, so that violence against the left carried little risk. The Fascists thus grew strong partly because the State declined to act against them.
11.3.5 The Failure Of The League Of Nations
The League of Nations had been set up after the war as an assembly of states meant to settle disputes by discussion and to prevent another war. Italians who felt cheated by the peace saw it as a body built to protect the settlement they resented.
The League also proved weak in practice. It had no army of its own, its important decisions required its members to agree unanimously, and the United States never joined it.
For the Fascists, this weakness was an argument. If international bodies could not enforce anything, they said, then a nation’s place in the world depended on its own strength, and a strong leader was worth more than a treaty.
It is sometimes claimed that a firmer League would have prevented the dictatorships altogether. That claim cannot be tested, and historians differ on it. What can be said is narrower: the League gave those who wanted to argue for national strength very little to argue against.
11.3.6 The Leadership Of Mussolini
Benito Mussolini began his political life on the left, as a socialist journalist and the editor of the party’s newspaper. He broke with the Socialists during the First World War, when he argued that Italy should join the fighting, and he was expelled from the party.
In 1919 he founded his combat groups, the fasci di combattimento, in Milan. Their volunteers wore black shirts, and they were used to organise violence against socialists and communists. Later he built these squads into the Fascist Party.
Mussolini’s own contribution was less doctrine than presentation. He was a practised speaker and newspaperman who could hold a crowd, and his speeches offered two things at once: pride in Italy’s past and order in its present.
He also changed position when it suited him. He had taken money from industrialists after starting as an opponent of theirs, and he offered different promises to workers, to owners and to the Church. His supporters called him Il Duce, ‘the Leader’, and by the end of 1922 he was Prime Minister of Italy.
A caution is worth stating here. Explaining why a leader was effective is not the same as approving of him, and this section explains the first only. What made Mussolini formidable — his skill with a crowd, his readiness to use violence, his willingness to change his promises — is exactly what made his rule dangerous.
11.4 Nazism In Germany: The Idea And Its Setting
Germany’s road to dictatorship began from a different starting point than Italy’s. Italy had ended the war among the victors and felt cheated; Germany had lost it outright, and had to build a new form of government out of that defeat.
11.4.1 The Weimar Republic
Germany was an empire until the last days of the First World War. When defeat became certain in November 1918, Emperor Wilhelm II was forced to give up the throne, and a republic was declared in his place.
Elections were held soon after for a national assembly. It met in January 1919 at Weimar, a quiet town chosen because Berlin was still disturbed by street fighting, and there it framed a new constitution. The republic that this constitution created is therefore known as the Weimar Republic.
The constitution was a democratic one by the standards of its day. It gave the vote to all adult men and women, it created a directly elected President as head of state, and it made the government answerable to the Reichstag, the elected lower house of the German legislature.
Its weakness lay in what happened when the arithmetic of the Reichstag did not work. The head of government, the Chancellor, needed the support of a majority of members, and seats were shared out by proportional representation among a large number of parties.
Flowchart
FC 11.1 — How A Government Was Formed Under The Weimar Constitution Caption: The rules that decided who governed Germany between 1919 and 1933. Nodes: Voters elect the Reichstag by proportional representation → seats are divided among many parties, usually with no single majority → the President appoints a Chancellor → the Chancellor forms a coalition cabinet → if the coalition holds a majority in the Reichstag, it governs and passes laws → if it loses that majority, the Chancellor must resign → the President may then appoint another Chancellor, or dissolve the Reichstag and order fresh elections, or keep a government in office by using his emergency powers to issue decrees without a Reichstag majority.
Follow the last branch carefully, because it did most of the damage. A President who could keep a Chancellor in office by decree meant that a government no longer strictly needed the confidence of the elected house.
Between 1919 and 1933 one short-lived cabinet followed another, and in the later years emergency decrees became a normal way of governing rather than an exception. Germans thus watched a parliament that could not decide, and a presidency that decided without it.
Popular anger with this arrangement was expressed in riots, in street clashes between armed political groups, and in more than one attempt to seize power outright. The republic survived those attempts, but it did not win affection.
11.4.2 The Nazi Party
Adolf Hitler was Austrian by birth. He had fought in the German army during the First World War and reached the rank of corporal, and like many ex-soldiers he refused to accept that Germany had been fairly beaten.
In 1919 he joined a small political group in Munich called the German Workers’ Party. He soon became its leader and gave it a new name — the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, shortened in ordinary speech to the Nazi Party.
The party built its own uniformed formations, and their work was physical from the start. One body, in brown shirts, guarded Nazi meetings and broke up the meetings of opposing parties. A second, in black shirts, served as a guard for the leadership.
In 1923 Hitler attempted to seize power by force in Munich, meaning to move on Berlin afterwards. The attempt failed, and he was arrested and imprisoned. He was released well before his term was over, and while in prison he wrote Mein Kampf, ‘My Struggle’, in which he set out the ideas of the movement.
Notice what the timeline does not show. At no point did the Nazi Party win a majority of German votes in a free election; it entered office as the largest party in a divided house, by appointment, and took its wider powers afterwards.
11.4.3 What The Nazis Believed
The aims Hitler set out in Mein Kampf were stated openly, and they were read by millions of Germans before 1933. They can be summarised in six points. (a) Nationalism was to be raised above every other loyalty, and Germany’s place in the world was to be restored by force if necessary. (b) The country was to be ruled by one great leader drawn from a single party, whose decisions were not to be questioned. (c) Internationalism, peace and democracy were treated with contempt, as the beliefs of the weak. (d) Force and brutality were accepted as proper instruments of politics, at home as well as abroad. (e) War itself was praised, not merely allowed — nations, Hitler argued, became great only by defeating others. (f) Germans were declared a superior race with the right to rule others, and Jewish people were named as the enemy within.
The last of these needs to be stated for what it was. Anti-Semitism is hostility towards, and persecution of, Jewish people, and in Nazi doctrine it was not a side opinion but a central organising claim.
The doctrine was false in every part. There is no scientific basis for ranking human groups as superior or inferior, and the accusations levelled at German Jews — of treachery in the war, of controlling the economy — were untrue.
Naming these beliefs accurately is part of understanding the period. It is also the reason the chapter treats them as an object of study and never as a point of view worth adopting.
11.5 Causes For The Rise Of Nazism In Germany
The causes of Nazism overlap with the Italian causes but are not identical to them. Germany carried a peace treaty imposed on a defeated state, a far deeper economic collapse, and a doctrine of race that had no counterpart in early Fascism.
11.5.1 The Humiliating Treaty Of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles was presented to Germany in 1919 and signed under protest. German representatives had taken no real part in drafting it, and the treaty included a clause requiring Germany to accept responsibility for causing the war.
The terms touched almost every part of national life: (a) Territory was lost. Alsace-Lorraine returned to France, districts went to Belgium, large areas including a corridor to the sea went to the restored state of Poland, and northern Schleswig passed to Denmark after a plebiscite — a direct vote of the people living in an area on which state should govern them. (b) Germany’s overseas colonies were taken away and placed under the administration of the victorious powers. (c) The army was cut to one lakh men, conscription was forbidden, and Germany was denied military aircraft, tanks and a substantial navy. (d) Germany was required to pay reparations — payments made by a defeated country to compensate the victors for war damage. The bill was fixed in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks.
Germans of almost every political view called the treaty a dictated peace rather than a negotiated one. The resentment was sharpened by the fact that the new republic, and not the old empire, had signed it.
Cartoon
Cartoon 11.1 Caption: German politics after 1919 was shaped by the weight of the peace terms. Brief: Draw a figure labelled ‘Germany’ pulling a heavy cart up a slope marked ‘Recovery’. The cart is loaded with labelled blocks — ‘Reparations’, ‘Lost Territory’, ‘Lost Colonies’, ‘Army Limits’. Signposts at the top of the slope read ‘Trade’ and ‘Employment’. Draw states as figures, never peoples as caricatures. Discuss: Whose argument is this cartoon making, and who would have disagreed with it?
The cartoon states the case that German nationalists made in the 1920s: that recovery was impossible while the treaty stood. That was a claim in a live political argument, not an agreed fact.
What a cartoon cannot draw is the counter-case. It cannot show that the payment terms were revised and eased more than once during the 1920s, that Germany’s economy grew for several years in the middle of the decade, or that some of its later troubles came from a worldwide slump rather than from the treaty at all.
11.5.2 The Economic Crisis
Germany’s economic difficulties came in two waves, and it is the second that matters most for the rise of the Nazi Party.
The first wave followed the war. Reparations had to be paid in foreign currency, some of the richest coal and iron districts had been lost, other countries raised tariffs against German goods, and in 1923 prices ran out of control until the currency was worth almost nothing. Families who had saved carefully for years found their savings could not buy a week’s food.
A period of recovery followed in the middle of the decade, helped by loans from the United States. German factories worked again, and support for extreme parties fell away.
The second wave began with the worldwide slump after 1929. American loans were called in, exports collapsed, and by 1932 about six million Germans were registered as unemployed. Farmers, already burdened with debt, could not sell their produce at a price that covered their costs.
The Nazis shaped their promises to fit this misery. Hitler assured farmers that their debts would be dealt with, assured industrialists that their firms would not be taken over by the State, and told the unemployed that Nazi rule would end their hardship and restore Germany’s standing.
Notice that these promises were made to groups whose interests conflicted. That was possible only because the party was not asked to reconcile them until it was in power.
11.5.3 The Fear Of Communism
The Bolshevik success in Russia had encouraged communist parties everywhere, and the German Communist Party was among the strongest in Europe. It organised effectively and won a substantial number of Reichstag seats.
Armed formations of the Nazi and Communist parties fought each other in German streets through the early 1930s. To many onlookers, the choice appeared to be between two disciplined movements rather than between democracy and dictatorship.
Hitler argued that German Communists would take their orders from Moscow, and that only Nazism could stop them. Shopkeepers, farmers, professionals and industrialists who feared losing their property found that argument persuasive, whatever else they thought of the Nazi Party.
11.5.4 The Resurgence Of Militant Nationalism
Parliamentary democracy in Germany had arrived at the moment of defeat, and many Germans never separated the two. They associated the republic with surrender, and looked back to the empire as a time of order and standing in the world.
A powerful and false claim circulated alongside this feeling: that the German army had not been beaten in the field but had been betrayed by politicians at home. Historians have long shown the claim to be untrue — the German command itself had told the government by 1918 that the war could not be won — but it was believed widely.
Nationalists of this kind valued prestige and national glory above liberty and civil freedom. They wanted a strong leader who would restore Germany’s position, and when Hitler offered exactly that, many welcomed him.
11.5.5 Anti-Semitic Propaganda
The Nazi Party pushed its hostility to Jewish Germans through relentless propaganda — information, ideas and images spread deliberately to shape what people believe, whether or not they are true.
The claims were specific and they were false. Nazi speakers and newspapers said that Jews had conspired with the Allies during the war, that they might betray Germany again, and that they controlled the economy and were the cause of ordinary Germans’ hardship.
Repetition did the work that evidence could not. A country looking for an explanation of its own suffering was offered a single enemy to blame, and a section of the population rallied behind the party on that basis.
This must be named for what it was: a campaign of hatred against a religious and cultural minority, built on untruths, which prepared the ground for persecution once the Nazis held power.
11.5.6 Unemployed Soldiers And The Volunteer Corps
The treaty’s military clauses had a consequence its authors had not intended. Cutting the army to one lakh men threw large numbers of trained soldiers out of employment in a country that had no other work for them.
Many of these men joined armed volunteer bands that formed after the war and never fully disbanded. They were used to discipline, to weapons and to obeying orders, and they had little attachment to the republic.
The Nazi Party drew on this pool for its own formations. Ex-soldiers gave the party a ready-made body of men who could carry its programme into the streets and protect its meetings, which no ordinary political party could match.
11.5.7 The Absence Of A Strong Opposition
The Nazis were never opposed by a single united force. The two largest parties of the left, the Social Democrats and the Communists, distrusted each other deeply and refused to combine against them.
Conservative politicians made a different miscalculation. Several of them believed that Hitler could be brought into government, used to hold off the Communists, and controlled by the experienced ministers around him.
The result was that the Nazi Party met no effective resistance at the point where resistance would have mattered most. Its rivals were busy with one another.
11.5.8 The Personality Of Hitler
Hitler’s personal effect on this story was real, and it can be measured rather than merely asserted. Party membership rolls, election returns, the reports of hostile journalists and the recorded size of Nazi meetings all point the same way.
He was a practised public speaker who prepared carefully and used the new tools of his time — the microphone, the radio broadcast, the mass rally staged for effect. He told audiences that Germany had been betrayed, that the treaty could be torn up, and that their hardship was somebody’s fault.
He was also a shrewd politician. He kept his party’s promises vague enough to appeal to farmers, workers and industrialists at once, and he judged accurately when to work within the law and when to threaten it.
11.6 Similarity Between The Ideologies Of Fascism And Nazism
Fascism and Nazism grew in different countries, out of different histories, and their leaders were rivals as often as partners. Yet on the central questions — who should rule, what a citizen is for, and how a nation should deal with its neighbours — they answered almost identically.
The first shared belief was faith in totalitarian rule. Both held that the State should reach into work, schooling, leisure, the press and belief, and that no part of life should be beyond its direction.
The second was contempt for democracy. Both dismissed parliamentary government as slow, divided and weak, and both argued that counting votes was no way to decide the interest of a nation.
The third followed from these. Both held that the State is supreme and the individual exists to serve it, and both acted on the view that rights and freedoms are granted by the State and may therefore be taken back.
The fourth was one-party, one-leader rule. Each movement banned or absorbed every rival party and built itself around a single figure — Mussolini as Il Duce and Hitler as Führer, both titles meaning ‘the Leader’.
The fifth was aggressive nationalism joined to imperialism. Both taught that their nation was destined for greatness, and that greatness required territory and influence taken from others.
The sixth was the treatment of war as an instrument of national policy. Neither regarded war as a failure of diplomacy; both presented it as a proper test of a nation’s strength and a legitimate way to pursue its interests.
The seventh was hostility to communism and to organised labour. Both movements grew by promising propertied and middle-class support against socialists and communists, and both dissolved free trade unions once in power.
The two ideologies were not identical, and it is a mistake to treat them as one thing under two names. Nazism placed a doctrine of racial supremacy and hatred of Jews at its very centre, and made it the organising principle of law and policy in a way that Italian Fascism did not originally do.
11.7 Summary
In the decade after the First World War democracy appeared to be spreading in Europe, but the spread did not hold. Several young democracies gave way to dictatorship, a form of government in which power rests with one person or one party who are not answerable to voters.
What emerged in Italy and Germany was a totalitarian state — one that claimed authority over the whole of a citizen’s life and not merely over public order. Its methods were a single legal party, censorship, secret policing, and mass organisations that demanded participation rather than mere obedience.
Democracy lost ground for reasons common to much of Europe.
- The war left broken trade, heavy debts, falling currencies and demobilised soldiers with no work.
- The peace settlement angered the defeated and disappointed some of the victors.
- The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 raised the fear of communism among property owners.
- Coalition governments rose and fell too quickly to carry through any settled policy.
‘Fascism’ comes from the Italian fascio, a bundle or league, and from the Roman fasces, a bundle of rods around an axe that displayed official authority. As a form of rule it means the concentration of State power in one leader and one party, with opposition forbidden.
Italy was a young state, unified only in the 1860s, industrially behind her neighbours and with shallow parliamentary roots. Proportional representation from 1919 made stable majorities unlikely, while pride in the Roman past gave nationalists an audience.
Fascism rose in Italy for several reasons acting together.
- Discontentment with the peace settlement: after about six hundred thousand deaths, Italy gained Trentino, South Tyrol and Adriatic territory, but not Fiume, most of Dalmatia or any colonies. Nationalists called it a ‘mutilated victory’.
- Economic crisis: war debt, inflation, unemployment among returning soldiers, food shortages and heavier taxes.
- Political instability: six coalition governments between 1919 and 1922, none able to act.
- Class conflict and the fear of communism: strikes, factory occupations and land seizures convinced landowners and industrialists that the State would not protect them, and they financed the Blackshirt squads.
- The failure of the League of Nations: it had no army, needed agreement among the great powers, and could do nothing about how a state governed at home.
- The leadership of Mussolini: a forceful speaker who worked on two levels at once, squads in the streets and negotiation in the capital.
Fascist aims were the rejection of democracy, one party and one leader, the supremacy of the State over the individual, control over every class, intense nationalism, hostility to socialism and communism, and war as an instrument of national policy.
Fascism came to power in Italy in October 1922 neither by winning an election nor by armed revolt. The government was handed to Mussolini by a King and by politicians who judged a Fascist ministry less dangerous than the alternatives they feared.
Germany after 1918 was governed by the Weimar Republic, a democratic state with universal suffrage and proportional representation. Its cabinets were short-lived, and Article 48 allowed the President to rule by emergency decree without defining what counted as an emergency.
Hitler joined a small Munich party in 1919 and rebuilt it as the Nazi Party, with its own uniformed formations. An attempt to seize power at Munich in 1923 failed; the party’s real growth came with the economic collapse after 1929.
Nazism rose in Germany for reasons that reinforced one another.
- The Treaty of Versailles: the war-guilt clause, lost territory and colonies, an army capped at 100,000 men, and reparations fixed in 1921 at roughly 33 billion dollars.
- Economic crisis: the currency collapse of 1923, then the depression after 1929 with unemployment climbing towards six million.
- Fear of communism: a large Communist bloc in the Reichstag and street fighting that frightened the propertied and middle classes.
- Militant nationalism: refusal to accept defeat, and a preference for prestige over parliamentary compromise.
- Anti-Semitic propaganda: false accusations against Jews, repeated relentlessly, that named an enemy for a humiliated population.
- Unemployed soldiers: the treaty’s military cuts left trained men without work, and the party recruited them.
- Absence of a strong opposition: the democratic parties would not combine, and conservatives believed Hitler could be controlled once in office.
- Hitler’s personality: an effective speaker, working on ground already broken by defeat, inflation and unemployment.
Nazi aims, set out in Mein Kampf, were to exalt nationalism, to be ruled by one leader from a single party, to despise internationalism, peace and democracy, to use force openly, to extol war and seek ‘living space’, and to uphold German racial supremacy. Anti-Semitism was central to this doctrine, and its accusations were false.
The two ideologies shared seven features: faith in totalitarian rule; contempt for democracy; the supremacy of the State over the individual; one-party and one-leader government; aggressive nationalism and imperialism; war as an instrument of policy; and hostility to communism and organised labour. They differed in that racial doctrine stood at the centre of Nazism from the beginning.
In both countries the decisive step was taken lawfully. Each leader was appointed to office under the existing constitution, and the dictatorship was built afterwards out of powers the constitution already contained.
11.8 Key Terms
- Anti-Semitism — hostility towards Jews, and the persecution that follows from it.
- Blackshirts — the armed Fascist squads in Italy, named after the uniform they wore.
- Coalition government — a government formed by several parties together, none of which can rule on its own.
- Communism — the belief that private ownership of land and factories should be ended and property held in common.
- Dictatorship — a form of government in which power is held by one person or one party, not answerable to the voters.
- Fascism — a form of rule concentrating State power in one leader and one party, with opposition forbidden and the individual held to exist for the State.
- Inflation — a general rise in prices that reduces what a given amount of money can buy.
- Nationalism — the belief that one’s own nation matters above all others and that its greatness must be restored or defended.
- Nazism — the ideology of the National Socialist party in Germany: one-party dictatorship, extreme nationalism, the glorification of war, and a doctrine of racial supremacy.
- Propaganda — information spread deliberately to promote a cause and shape opinion, whether or not it is true.
- Reparations — payments made by a defeated state to compensate the victors for war damage.
- Totalitarian state — a state that claims authority over the whole of a citizen’s life, and not merely over public order.
11.9 Points to Ponder
In both Italy and Germany the decisive step was taken lawfully, by appointment under an existing constitution. What does that suggest about what a written constitution can and cannot protect on its own?
Italian industrialists and landowners paid for squads they expected to dismiss once the danger had passed. When a private force is hired to do what the State will not, who ends up controlling whom?
Article 48 was written for genuine emergencies, and it did not define what an emergency was. Is it possible to draft an emergency power so that it cannot become a permanent one?
The Nazi accusations against Jews were false, and they were widely believed. What makes a simple false explanation more attractive to people than a complicated true one?
Hitler’s speeches drew small crowds in the prosperous years and enormous ones after 1929. How much of a leader’s rise belongs to the leader, and how much to the conditions?
The League of Nations had no authority over how a member state treated its own citizens. Should an association of states be able to look inside its members’ borders, and what would be the cost either way?
11.10 Objective Questions
The word ‘Fascism’ is derived from the Italian word fascio, which means
- an axe
- a bundle or league
- an empire
- a leader [1 mark]
Which of the following did Italy NOT obtain under the peace settlement of 1919?
- Trentino
- South Tyrol
- The port of Fiume
- Territory at the head of the Adriatic [1 mark]
Under the Weimar Constitution, the provision that allowed the President to act by emergency decree was
- Article 24
- Article 48
- Article 61
- Article 76 [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: The Nazi Party grew out of a small political group in Munich called the ____________, which Hitler joined in 1919. [1 mark]
State whether the following statement is true or false: The Fascists came to power in Italy in 1922 by winning a majority in a general election. [1 mark]
Assertion (A): Italian landowners and industrialists gave money to the Blackshirt squads. Reason (R): They believed the elected government would not protect their property against strikes and land seizures.
- Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A).
- Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A).
- is true but (R) is false.
- is false but (R) is true. [1 mark]
Match the items in Column A with those in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Il Duce | i. The elected lower house of the German legislature |
| b. Führer | ii. The title taken by Mussolini |
| c. Mein Kampf | iii. The book in which Hitler set out the aims of the movement |
| d. Reichstag | iv. The title taken by Hitler after 1934 |
11.11 Check Your Concepts
Define a totalitarian state, and state one way in which it differs from an older form of one-man rule. [2 marks]
Name any two aims of Fascism as it developed in Italy. [2 marks]
Give reasons why Italian nationalists described the outcome of the peace settlement of 1919 as a ‘mutilated victory’. [3 marks]
Explain briefly how political instability in Italy between 1919 and 1922 worked to the advantage of the Fascists. [3 marks]
Explain, with one example from Italy, how the fear of socialism and communism contributed to the rise of Fascism. [4 marks]
Trace the chain by which the economic depression that began in 1929 helped the Nazi Party grow in Germany. [4 marks]
Describe any five causes for the rise of Nazism in Germany, showing in each case why it turned people towards the Nazi Party. [5 marks]
‘Fascism and Nazism grew out of different histories but agreed in their ideologies.’ Discuss this statement with reference to any five features the two shared, and state one point on which they differed. [6 marks]
11.12 Show Your Skills
- Study the description of the photograph given below and answer the questions that follow. A photograph taken in a German city in the winter of 1932 shows a long queue of men in overcoats waiting outside a labour exchange, the office where the unemployed registered for relief and for work.
- Name the economic event that produced scenes of this kind in Germany, and state when it began.
- Explain how the Nazi Party used conditions of this kind to win support from two different groups of Germans.
- State one thing this photograph cannot tell you about unemployment in Germany, and name one other kind of evidence a historian would need. [4 marks]
- Read the situation below and answer the questions that follow. In a classroom debate, the first speaker argues that dictatorship came to Italy and Germany because ordinary people voted for it and wanted it. The second speaker argues that in both countries power was handed over by kings, presidents and politicians who thought they could control the new leaders. The class is asked to weigh the two claims.
- State one piece of evidence from Italy in 1922 that supports the second speaker.
- State one piece of evidence from Germany in 1932 and 1933 that supports the second speaker.
- What would you need to know about elections and voting in the two countries before you could accept the first speaker’s claim? [5 marks]
- Read the imagined situation below and answer the questions that follow. A German soldier is discharged in 1920, when the army is reduced under the terms of the peace treaty. He has no trade other than soldiering, his savings lose their value in 1923, and he finds occasional work only. In 1930 a party recruiter offers him a uniform, regular pay and a purpose.
- Identify the two terms of the Treaty of Versailles that between them explain his situation in 1920.
- Explain why men in his position were valuable to the Nazi Party, and what the party used them for.
- Would his case, on its own, be enough to explain the rise of Nazism? Give one reason for your answer. [5 marks]