The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  Hitler’s opportunity came around with the next crisis: the economic crash of the 1930s. As millions of people lost their jobs, fascist movements everywhere recovered their momentum. Governments of all sorts, democracies more publicly and noisily than the rest, became paralyzed by awkward choices. The Italian model made fascist movements look plausible again, as a new way to provide mass assent for a restoration of order, national authority, and economic productivity.

  The Weimar Republic’s constitutional system had never achieved general legitimacy in Germany; many Germans considered it the offspring of foreign domination and internal treason. Weimar democracy resembled a candle burning at both ends. Eaten away from both right and left by antisystem Nazis and communists, the dwindling center was obliged to form heterogeneous coalitions pairing such incompatible partners as socialists with laissez-faire moderates and clericals with anticlericals in its doomed quest for a working parliamentary majority.

  A political system that obliged such a cacophony of parties to work together would inevitably have trouble agreeing on sensitive issues, even in good times. After 1929 German governments had to make increasingly divisive political and economic choices. In June of that year came the Young Plan, an international agreement by which Germany promised to continue paying reparations for World War I to the Allies, though at a reduced rate. Although German diplomacy had successfully lowered the payments, the Young Plan’s confirmation of the principle of reparations aroused a nationalist outcry. In October came the Wall Street crash. In 1930, as unemployment soared, the government had to decide whether to extend unemployment benefits (as socialists and Left Catholics wanted) or balance the budget to satisfy foreign creditors (as middle-class and conservative parties wanted). A clear choice, but one about which no majority available in Germany would be able to agree.

  When the government of Chancellor Hermann Müller fell on March 27, 1930, the German governing system seized up in terminal deadlock. Müller, a reformist socialist, had presided since June 1928 over a five-party Great Coalition stretching from the socialists through the Catholic Center Party to the moderate centrist Democratic Party and the internationalist but conservative People’s Party. The Great Coalition lasted longer than any other government of the Weimar Republic, twenty-one months (June 1928–March 1930).10

  Instead of being a sign of strength, however, this longevity signaled the absence of alternatives. Deep policy disagreements that had made governing hard enough when the Great Coalition was first formed, in the relatively calm days of June 1928, made it impossible two years later after the Depression had thrown millions out of work. The Left wanted to raise taxes to maintain unemployment compensation; moderates and conservatives wanted to reduce social spending in order to cut taxes. The Great Coalition foundered on these reefs of social entitlement and tax burdens. After March 1930 no parliamentary majority could be cobbled together in Germany. The Catholic trade union official Heinrich Brüning governed as chancellor without a majority, relying upon President Hindenburg to sign legislation into law without a majority vote, under emergency powers granted him by Article 48 of the constitution. Thereafter Germans endured nearly three years of this awkward emergency government, with no parliamentary majority, before Hitler had his chance. In a curious irony, Hitler’s arrival in power seemed to permit, at long last, a return to majority government. Hitler was a godsend for conservatives because, as the head of what was since July 1932 Germany’s largest party, he held out the possibility for the first time of a parliamentary majority that excluded the Left.

  At the moment when deadlock gripped the German political system, on March 27, 1930, the Nazi Party was still quite small (only 2.8 percent of the popular vote in the parliamentary elections of May 1928). But nationalist agitation over the Young Plan plus the collapse of farm prices and urban employment catapulted it in the September 1930 elections from 12 to 107 seats out of 491—already the second largest party. After that, any parliamentary majority in Germany had to include either the socialists or the Nazis. The Left (even assuming that the socialists, communists, and Left Catholics could overcome their crippling divisions sufficiently to govern) was excluded out of hand by President Hindenburg and his advisors.

  The myth of the Fascist coup in Italy also misled the German Left, and helped assure the fatal passivity of the German Socialist Party (SPD) and the German Communist Party (KPD) in late 1932 and early 1933. Both expected the Nazis to attempt a coup, though their analyses of the situation were otherwise totally different. For the SPD, the expected Nazi uprising would be their signal to act without bearing the onus of illegality, as they had successfully done with a general strike against the “Kapp Putsch" of 1920, when Freikorps units had tried to take over the government. Given that frame of mind, they never identified an opportune moment for counteraction against Hitler.

  The nearest thing to a putsch in Weimar Germany in the early 1930s came not from the Nazis but from their conservative predecessor, Chancellor Franz von Papen. On July 20, 1932, von Papen deposed the legitimately elected government of the state (Land) of Prussia, a coalition of socialists and the Catholic Center Party, and prevailed upon President Hindenburg to use his emergency powers to install a new state administration headed by von Papen. That act might legitimately have triggered strong counteraction from the Left. The SPD leaders, however, deterred by strong legalitarian convictions, advancing age,11 the futility of the strike weapon during mass unemployment, and perhaps legitimate fears that action by the Left might perversely throw even more middle-class Germans into the arms of the Nazis, limited their response to a futile lawsuit against Chancellor von Papen. Having failed to offer effective opposition to von Papen’s illegal action in July 1932, the socialists—still the second largest party in Germany—had even less occasion to act against Hitler, who avoided any direct assault on legality until he was already in unshakable control in spring 1933. 12

  The communists followed a totally different logic, based upon their conviction that social revolution was at hand. In that perspective, Nazi success might actually help the communist cause by setting off a pendulum movement, first to the Right and then, inexorably, to the Left. KPD strategists, focused firmly on the coming revolution, saw SPD efforts to save Weimar democracy as “objectively" counterrevolutionary. They denounced the socialists as “social fascists." Convinced that the SPD was no less their enemy than the Nazis and competing with the Nazis for the same volatile membership (especially the unemployed), the KPD even cooperated with the Nazis in a wildcat strike against the Berlin transport system in November 1932. The last thing the German communists were going to do was help the SPD save democratic institutions.13

  Hitler’s electoral success—far greater than Mussolini’s—allowed him more autonomy in bargaining with the political insiders whose help he needed to reach office. Even more than in Italy, as German governmental mechanisms jammed after 1930, responsibility for finding a way out narrowed to a half-dozen men: President Hindenburg, his son Oskar and other intimate advisors, and the last two Weimar chancellors, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher. At first they tried to keep the uncouth Austrian ex-corporal out. One must recall that in the 1930s cabinet ministers were still supposed to be gentlemen. Bringing raw fascists into government was a measure of their desperation.

  The Catholic aristocrat Franz von Papen tried as chancellor (July– November 1932) to govern without politicians, through a so-called Cabinet of Barons composed of technical experts and nonpolitical eminences. His gamble at holding national elections in July let the Nazis become the largest party. Von Papen then tried to bring Hitler in as vice chancellor, a position without authority, but the Nazi leader had enough strategic acumen and gambler’s courage to accept nothing but the top office. This path forced Hitler to spend the tense fall of 1932 in an agony of suspenseful waiting, trying to quiet his restless and office-hungry militants while he played for all or nothing.

  Hoping to deepen the crisis, the Nazis (like the Fascists befor
e them) increased their violence, carefully choosing their targets. The apogee of Nazi street violence in Germany came after June 16, 1932, when Chancellor von Papen lifted the ban on SA uniforms that Brüning had imposed in April. During several sickening weeks, 103 people were killed and hundreds were wounded.14

  Mussolini had played a weaker hand in his negotiations for power, and it had rested more than Hitler’s on overt violence. We often forget that Mussolinian Fascism was more violent than Nazism on its way to power. On May 5, 1921, alone, election day, 19 people were killed in political violence in Italy and 104 wounded.15 Though the statistics are unreliable, plausible estimates of the dead in political violence in Italy during 1920–22 include five to six hundred Fascists and two thousand anti-Fascists and non-Fascists, followed by another one thousand of the latter in 1923–26.16

  Von Papen’s expedient of new elections on November 6 diminished the Nazi vote somewhat (the communists gained again), but did nothing to extract Germany from constitutional deadlock. President Hindenburg replaced him as chancellor on December 2 with a senior army officer regarded as more technocratic than reactionary, General Kurt von Schleicher. During his brief weeks in power (December 1932–January 1933), Schleicher prepared an active job-creation program and mended relations with organized labor. Hoping to obtain Nazi neutrality in parliament, he flirted with Gregor Strasser, head of the party administration and a leader of its anticapitalist current (Hitler never forgot and never forgave Strasser’s “betrayal").

  At this point, Hitler was in serious difficulty. In the elections of November 6, his vote had dropped for the first time, costing him his most precious asset—momentum. The party treasury was nearly empty. Gregor Strasser was not the only senior Nazi who, exhausted by Hitler’s all-or-nothing strategy, was considering other options.

  The Nazi leader was rescued by Franz von Papen. Bitter at Schleicher for taking his place, von Papen secretly arranged a deal whereby Hitler would be chancellor and he, von Papen, deputy chancellor—a position from which von Papen expected to run things. The aged Hindenburg, convinced by his son and other intimate advisors that Schleicher was planning to depose him and install a military dictatorship, and convinced by von Papen that no other conservative option remained, appointed the Hitler–von Papen government on January 30, 1933.17 Hitler, concluded Alan Bullock, had been “hoist" into office by “a backstairs conspiracy." 18

  What Did Not Happen: Election, Coup d’État, Solo Triumph

  German voters never gave the Nazis a majority of the popular vote, as is still sometimes alleged. As we saw in the last chapter, the Nazis did indeed become the largest party in the German Reichstag in the parliamentary election of July 31, 1932, with 37.2 percent of the vote. They then slipped back to 33.1 percent in the parliamentary election of November 6, 1932. In the parliamentary election of March 6, 1933, with Hitler as chancellor and the Nazi Party in command of all the resources of the German state, its score was a more significant but still insufficient 43.9 percent.19 More than one German in two voted against Nazi candidates in that election, in the teeth of intimidation by Storm Troopers. The Italian Fascist Party won 35 out of 535 seats, in the one free parliamentary election in which it participated, on May 15, 1921. 20

  At the other extreme, neither Hitler nor Mussolini arrived in office by a coup d’état. Neither took the helm by force, even if both had used force before power in order to destabilize the existing regime, and both were to use force again, after power, in order to transform their governments into dictatorships (as we will see shortly). Even the most scrupulous authors refer to their “seizure of power,"21 but that phrase better describes what the two fascist leaders did after reaching office than how they got into office.

  Both Mussolini and Hitler were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors. Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg. Both these appointments were made, it must be added at once, under conditions of extreme crisis, which the fascists had abetted. I will consider the kind of crisis that opens the way to fascism below.

  Indeed no insurrectionary coup against an established state has ever so far brought fascists to power. Authoritarian dictatorships have several times crushed such attempts.22 This happened three times to the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael, the most ecstatically religious of all fascist parties and one of the readiest to murder Jews and bourgeois politicians. In a Romania wretchedly governed by a corrupt and narrow oligarchy, the legion had a fervent rapport with its popular following, mostly hitherto apolitical peasants dazzled by the youthful Corneliu Codreanu and his disciples, touring remote villages on horseback, decked out with green shirts and religious and patriotic banners.23

  After a particularly sterile period of parliamentary infighting and cronyism, Romanian King Carol assumed dictatorial powers on February 10, 1938. In November, having tried and failed to coopt the increasingly violent legion into his official Front of National Rebirth, Carol arrested Codreanu, who was subsequently killed, along with some associates, “while trying to escape." Codreanu’s successor Horia Sima responded in January 1939 with an insurrection, which the royal dictatorship repressed firmly.

  Carol abdicated in September 1940 after victorious Germany had forced Romania to cede territories to Hungary and Bulgaria. The new Romanian dictator, General (later Marshal) Ion Antonescu, in another attempt to harness the legion’s popular following, made it the sole party in the “National Legionary State" he formed on September 15, 1940. Horia Sima, the legion’s impetuous new head, set up “parallel" police and labor organizations and began the confiscation of Jewish property, so disorganizing the Romanian state and economy that Antonescu, with Hitler’s approval, began in January 1941 to curtail Horia’s powers. A full-scale revolt and pogrom launched by the legion on January 21 was bloodily crushed by Antonescu in “the most extreme example"24 of a conservative repression of fascism. Antonescu liquidated the legion and replaced the National Legionary State with a pro-German but nonfascist military dictatorship.25

  Other fascist coup attempts fared no better. While the July 25, 1934, coup by the Austrian Nazi Party succeeded in murdering Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, his successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, repressed Nazism in Austria and governed through a single clerical-authoritarian party, the Fatherland Front.

  Although conservatives might accept violence against socialists and trade unionists, they would not tolerate it against the state. For their part, most fascist leaders have recognized that a seizure of power in the teeth of conservative and military opposition would be possible only with the help of the street, under conditions of social disorder likely to lead to wildcat assaults on private property, social hierarchy, and the state’s monopoly of armed force. A fascist resort to direct action would thus risk conceding advantages to fascism’s principal enemy, the Left, still powerful in the street and workplace in interwar Europe.26 Such tactics would also alienate those very elements—the army and the police—that the fascists would need later for planning and carrying out aggressive national expansion. Fascist parties, however deep their contempt for conservatives, had no plausible future aligning themselves with any groups who wanted to uproot the bases of conservative power.

  Since the fascist route to power has always passed through cooperation with conservative elites, at least in the cases so far known, the strength of a fascist movement in itself is only one of the determining variables in the achievement (or not) of power, though it is surely a vital one. Fascists did have numbers and muscle to offer to conservatives caught in crisis in Italy and Germany, as we have seen. Equally important, however, was the conservative elites’ willingness to work with fascism; a reciprocal flexibility on the fascist leaders’ part; and the urgency of the crisis that induced them to cooperate with each othe
r.

  It is therefore essential to examine the accomplices who helped at crucial points. To watch only the fascist leader during his arrival in power is to fall under the spell of the “Führer myth" and the “Duce myth" in a way that would have given those men immense satisfaction. We must spend as much time studying their indispensable allies and accomplices as we spend studying the fascist leaders, and as much time studying the kinds of situation in which fascists were helped into power as we spend studying the movements themselves.

  Forming Alliances

  Entering seriously into a quest for power engaged mature fascist movements deeply in the process of forming alliances with the establishment. Italian and German conservatives had not created Mussolini and Hitler, of course, though they had too often let their law breaking go unpunished. After the Fascists and the Nazis had made themselves too important to ignore, by the somewhat different mixtures of electoral appeal and violent intimidation that we saw in the last chapter, the conservatives had to decide what to do with them.

  In particular, conservative leaders had to decide whether to try to coopt fascism or force it back to the margins. One crucial decision was whether the police and the courts would compel the fascists to obey the law. German chancellor Brüning attempted to curb Nazi violence in 1931–32. He banned uniformed actions by the SA on April 14, 1932. When Franz von Papen succeeded Brüning as chancellor in July 1932, however, he lifted the ban, as we saw above, and the Nazis, excited by vindication, set off the most violent period in the whole 1930–32 constitutional crisis. In Italy, although a few prefects tried to restrain Fascist lawlessness,27 the national leaders preferred, at crucial moments, as we already know, to try to “transform" Mussolini rather than to discipline him. Conservative national leaders in both countries decided that what the fascists had to offer outweighed the disadvantages of allowing these ruffians to capture public space from the Left by violence. The nationalist press and conservative leaders in both countries consistently applied a double standard to judging fascist and left-wing violence.