{"id":134,"date":"2023-03-24T05:27:15","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T09:27:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/chapter\/chapter-16-fascism\/"},"modified":"2025-06-29T13:26:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T17:26:00","slug":"chapter-16-fascism","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/chapter\/chapter-16-fascism\/","title":{"raw":"Chapter 16: Fascism","rendered":"Chapter 16: Fascism"},"content":{"raw":"<h2>16.1 Introduction<\/h2>\r\nAs we saw in the last chapter, the period following World War I was marked by significant social, economic, political, and cultural upheaval in Europe. The Treaty of Versailles had imposed punishing reparations on Germany and the Great Depression increased economic instability across Europe. As a result, new political movements emerged, including Fascism and the Nazi movement in Germany, which sought to address these instabilities through authoritarian governmental control. This complex and tumultuous period in European history had profound consequences not only for Europe but also for the world.\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--examples\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\">Terms for Identification<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Treaty of Versailles<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Fascism<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Aryan<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Duce<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Benito Mussolini<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Stab-in-the-back myth<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Weimar Republic<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Adolf Hitler<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Enabling Act<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Hitler Youth<\/li>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c4\">Schutzstaffel<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Nazism<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Spanish Civil War<\/li>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c3\">Francisco Franco<\/span><\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2 id=\"h.2250f4o\" class=\"c18\"><span class=\"c22\">16.2 Disappointment<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In many ways, World War I was what truly ended the nineteenth century. \u00a0It undermined the faith in progress that had grown, despite all of its setbacks, throughout the nineteenth century among many, perhaps most, Europeans. \u00a0The major political movements of the nineteenth century seemed to have succeeded: everywhere in Europe nations replaced empires (nationalism). \u00a0Europe controlled more of the world in 1920 than it ever had or ever would again (imperialism). \u00a0In the aftermath of the war, almost every government in Europe, even Germany, was a republican democracy based on the rule of law (liberalism). \u00a0Even socialists had cause to celebrate: there was a nominally Marxist state in Russia and socialist parties were powerful and militant all across Europe. \u00a0The old order of monarchs and nobles was rendered all but obsolete, with noble titles holding on as nothing more than archaic holdovers from the past in nearly every country. \u00a0In addition, of course, technology continued to advance apace.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">Despite the success of all of those movements, however, with all of the hopes and aspirations of their supporters over the last century, Europe had degenerated into a horrendous and costly war. \u00a0The war had <span class=\"c4\">not<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> purified and invigorated the great powers; they were all left reeling, weakened, and at a loss for how to prevent a future war. \u00a0Science had advanced, but its most noteworthy accomplishment was the production of more effective weapons. \u00a0The global empires remained, but the seeds of their dissolution were already present. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The results were bitterness and reprisals. \u00a0<strong>The Treaty of Versailles<\/strong> that ended the war imposed harsh penalties on Germany, returning Alsace and Lorraine to France and imposing a massive indemnity on the defeated country. \u00a0The Treaty also required Germany to accept the \"war guilt clause,\" in which it assumed full responsibility for the war having started in the first place. \u00a0Simultaneously, the Austrian Empire collapsed, with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the new Balkan nation of Yugoslavia all becoming independent countries and Austria a short-lived republic. \u00a0Almost no one would have believed that another \"Great War\" would occur in twenty years.<\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_266\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"591\"]<img class=\"wp-image-266 \" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2023\/03\/German_losses_after_WWI.svg_.png\" alt=\"Map showing German territorial losses after World War One.\" width=\"591\" height=\"502\" \/> German territorial losses after World War One. The territory in green was administered by the League of Nations.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In other words, World War I did not resolve any of the problems or international tensions that had started it. \u00a0Instead, it made them worse because it proved how powerful and devastating modern weapons were, and it also demonstrated that no single power was likely to be able to assert its dominance. \u00a0France and Britain went out of their way in blaming Germany for the conflict, while in Germany itself, those on the right believed in the conspiracy theory in which communists and Jews had conspired to sabotage the German war effort - this was later called the \"Stab in the Back\" myth. \u00a0Thus, many Germans felt they had been wronged twice: they had not \u201creally\u201d lost the war, yet they were forced to pay outrageous indemnities to the \u201cvictors.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">It was in this context of anger and disappointment that fascism and its racially-obsessed offshoot Nazism arose. \u00a0World War I provided the trauma, the bloodshed, and the skepticism toward liberalism and socialism that underwrote the rise of fascism. \u00a0Fascism was a modern conservatism, a conservatism that clung to its mania for order and hierarchy, but which did not seek a return to the days of feudalism and monarchy. \u00a0It was a populist movement, a movement of the people by the people, but instead of petty democratic bickering, it glorified the (imagined) nation, a nation united by a movement and an ethos. <\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 id=\"h.haapch\" class=\"c18\"><span class=\"c22\">16.3 Fascism<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><strong>Fascism<\/strong> centered on the glorification of the state, the rejection of liberal individualism, and an incredible emphasis on hierarchy and authority. \u00a0Fascist movements sprung up right as the war ended. \u00a0The term fascism was invented by the Italian Fascist Party itself, based on the term <span class=\"c4\">fascii<\/span><span class=\"c3\">: a bundle of sticks with an axe embedded in the middle. \u00a0Symbolically, the sticks are weak individually but strong as a group, and the axe represented the power over life and death. \u00a0In ancient Rome, the bodyguards of the Roman consuls carried fascii as a badge of authority over war, peace, law, and death, and that symbolism appealed to the Italian Fascists.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">By the early 1920s, there were fascist movements in many European countries, all of them agitating for some kind of right-wing revolution against democracy and socialism. \u00a0One place of particular note in the early history of fascism was France. \u00a0There, a right-wing monarchist group called <span class=\"c4\">Actione Fran\u00e7aise<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> had existed since the Dreyfus Affair, but it transformed itself into a French fascist group despite still clinging to monarchist and traditional Catholic ideologies. \u00a0When Germany defeated France in World War II, the Nazis found a large contingent of right-wing Frenchmen who were all too happy to create a home-grown French fascist state (a fact that many in France tried their best to forget after the war). \u00a0Likewise, when the Nazis seized power in various places in Eastern Europe, they often found it expedient to simply work with or appoint the already-existing local fascist groups to power.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">Fascism was a twentieth-century phenomenon, but its ideological roots were firmly planted in the nineteenth century. \u00a0Mostly obviously, fascism was an extreme form of nationalism. \u00a0The nation was not just the home of a \u201cpeople\u201d in fascism, it was <span class=\"c4\">everything<\/span><span class=\"c3\">. \u00a0The nation became a mythic entity that had existed since the ancient past, and fascists claimed that the cultural traits and patterns of the nation defined who a person was and how they regarded the world. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The confusing jumble of what defined a nation in the first place often took on explicitly racial, and racist, terms among fascist groups. \u00a0Now, Germans were not just people who spoke German in Central Europe; they were the German (or \u201c<strong>Aryan<\/strong>,\u201d the term itself nothing more than a pseudo-scholarly jumble of linguistic history and racist nonsense) \u201crace.\u201d \u00a0French fascists talked about the bloodlines of the ancient Gauls that supposedly survived despite the \u201cpollution\u201d of the Roman invasions in the ancient past. Likewise, Mussolini and the Italian Fascists claimed that \u201cthe Italians\u201d were the direct descendants of the most glorious tradition of the ancient Roman Empire and were destined to create a new, even greater empire. \u00a0The pseudo-sciences of race had arisen in the late nineteenth century as perverse offshoots of genuine advances in biology and the natural sciences. \u00a0Fascism was, among other things, a cultural movement that found in \u201cscientific\u201d racism a profoundly compatible doctrine: the \u201cscientific\u201d proof in the rightness of the racial nation\u2019s rise to power.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">At first sight, one surprising aspect of fascism was that many fascists were former communists \u2013 <strong>Benito Mussolini,<\/strong> the leader of the Italian Fascist Party, had been a prominent member of the Italian Communist Party before World War I. \u00a0What fascism and communism had in common was a rejection of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. \u00a0They both sought transcendent political and social orders that went beyond \u201cmere\u201d parliamentary compromise. \u00a0The major difference between them was that fascists discovered in World War I that most people were not willing to die for their social class, but they were willing to die for their nation. \u00a0Fascism was, in part, a kind of collective movement that substituted nationalism for the class war. \u00a0All classes would be united in the nation, fascists believed, for the greater glory of the race and movement.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h3 class=\"c17\"><span class=\"c22\">Italian Fascism<\/span><\/h3>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">As noted above, the very term \u201cfascist\u201d is a product of the first fascist group to seize control of a powerful country: the Italian Fascist Party. \u00a0Italian Fascism was an invention of Italian army veterans. \u00a0Most important among them was Benito Mussolini, a combat veteran who had welcomed the war as a cleansing, invigorating opportunity for Italy to grow into a more powerful nation. \u00a0He was deeply disappointed by its lackluster aftermath. \u00a0 Italy, having joined with England and France against Germany and Austria in hopes of seizing territory from the Austrians, was given very little land after the war. \u00a0Thus, to Mussolini and many other Italians, the war had been <span class=\"c4\">especially<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> pointless.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Fascists, who started out with a mere 100 members in the northern Italian city of Milan, grew rapidly because of the incredible social turmoil in Italy in 1919 and 1920. Italy had a powerful communist movement, one that was inspired by and linked to the Soviet Union\u2019s recent birth and the success of the communist revolution in Russia. After the war, a huge strike wave struck Italy and many poor Italians in the countryside seized land from the semi-feudal landlords who still dominated rural society. \u00a0There was genuine concern among traditional conservatives, the Church, business leaders, and the middle classes that Italy would undergo a communist revolution just as had occurred in Russia - at the time Russia was still in the midst of its civil war between the \"Red\" Bolsheviks and the anti-communist coalition known as the Whites. \u00a0By 1920 the Reds were clearly winning.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Fascists organized themselves into paramilitary units of thugs known as <strong>the Blackshirts<\/strong> (for their party-issued uniforms) and engaged in open street fighting against communists, breaking up strikes, attacking communist leaders, destroying communist newspaper offices, and intimidating voters from communist-leaning neighborhoods and communities. \u00a0They were often tacitly aided by the police, who rounded up communists but ignored Fascist lawbreaking as long as it was directed against the communists. \u00a0Likewise, business leaders started funding the Fascists as a kind of guarantee against further gains by communists. \u00a0Fascist politicians ran for office in the Italian parliament while their gangs of thugs terrorized the opposition.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">In 1922, the weak-willed King of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele III, appointed Mussolini Prime Minister, seeing in Mussolini a bulwark against the threat of communism (and caving in to the growing strength of the Fascist Party). \u00a0Fascists from all over Italy converged in a famous \u201cMarch on Rome,\u201d a highly staged piece of political theater meant to demonstrate Fascist unity and strength. \u00a0Mussolini then set out to destroy Italian democracy from within. \u00a0From 1922 to 1926 Mussolini and the Fascists manipulated the Italian parliament, intimidated political opponents or actually had them murdered, and succeeded finally in eliminating party politics and a free press. \u00a0The Fascist party became the only legal party in Italy and the police apparatus expanded dramatically. \u00a0Mussolini's official title was <strong><span class=\"c4\">Il Duce<\/span><\/strong><span class=\"c3\">: \"The Leader,\" and his authority over every political decision was absolute. \u00a0The Fascist motto was \u201cbelieve, obey, fight,\u201d a distant parody of the French liberal motto (from the French Revolution) \u201cliberty, equality, fraternity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"635\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2023\/03\/image8-1.jpg\" alt=\"Mussolini standing in the midst of blackshirt Fascists.\" width=\"635\" height=\"474\" \/> Mussolini (in the center) and Fascist Blackshirts during the March on Rome in 1922.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">Mussolini immediately understood the importance of appearances. \u00a0The 1920s was the early age of mass media, especially radio, and an intrinsic part of fascism was public spectacle. \u00a0Mussolini staged enormous public exhibitions and rallies and he carefully controlled how he was portrayed in the media \u2013 the press was forbidden to mention his age or his birthday, to give the illusion that he never aged. \u00a0He was always on the move, usually in a race car, and usually accompanied by models, actresses, and socialites years his junior. \u00a0He spoke about his own \"animal magnetism\" and often walked around without a shirt on as a kind of (would be) herculean archetype. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Officially, Italian Fascism promised to end the class conflict that lay at the heart of socialist ideology by favoring what it called \u201ccorporatism\u201d over mere capitalism. \u00a0Corporatism was supposed to be a unified decision-making system in which workers and business owners would serve on joint committees to control work. \u00a0In fact, the owners derived all of the benefits; trade unions were banned and the plight of workers degenerated without representation. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">What Italian Fascism did do for the Italian people was essentially ideological and, in a sense, emotional: it directed youth movements and recreational clubs and sought the involvement of all Italians. \u00a0It glorified the <span class=\"c4\">idea <\/span>of the Italian people and in turn many <span class=\"c4\">actual <\/span><span class=\"c3\">Italians did come to feel great national pride, even if they were working in difficult conditions in a stagnant economy. \u00a0In turn, Fascist propaganda tried to inculcate Italian pride and Fascist identity among Italian citizens, while Fascist-led police forces targeted would-be dissidents, sentencing thousands to prison terms or internal exile in closed prison villages (not unlike some of the Russian gulags that would exemplify a different but related totalitarian system to the east).<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">While Mussolini was often praised in the foreign press, including in American newspapers and magazines, for accomplishments like making (a few) Italian trains run on time, in the long term the Fascist government proved to be inefficient and often outright ineffectual. \u00a0Mussolini himself, convinced of his own genius, made arbitrary and often foolish decisions, especially when it came to building up and training the Italian military. \u00a0The circle of Fascist leaders around him were largely corrupt sycophants who lied to Mussolini about Italy's strength and prosperity to keep him happy. \u00a0When World War II began in 1939, the Italian forces were revealed to be poorly trained, equipped, and led.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ol>\r\n \t<li>What were the disappointments and disillusion that Europe faced at the end of World War I?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>What were the main ideals of Fascism and how was it a response to the trauma and skepticism of the post-war decades?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>How was fascism different from the political movements of the 19th century, and how did it shape society in the decades following World War I?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2 id=\"h.319y80a\" class=\"c18\"><span class=\"c22\">16.4 The Weimar Republic<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">One place in Europe during the interwar period stands out as a microcosm of the political and cultural struggles occurring elsewhere: Weimar Germany. \u00a0Named after the resort town in which its constitution was written in early 1919, the <strong>Weimar Republic<\/strong> represented a triumphant culmination of liberalism. \u00a0Its constitution guaranteed universal suffrage for men and women, fundamental human rights, and the complete rejection of the remnants of monarchism. \u00a0Unfortunately, the government of the new republic was deeply unpopular among many groups, including right-wing army veterans like a young <strong>Adolf Hitler.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">One great lie that poisoned the political climate of the Weimar Republic was, as mentioned above, <strong>the \u201cstab-in-the-back\u201d myth<\/strong>. \u00a0Toward the end of World War I, Germany was losing. \u00a0Its own General Staff informed the Kaiser of this fact; with American troops and munitions flooding in, it was simply a matter of time before the Allies were able to march in force on Germany. \u00a0As defeat loomed, however, the military leaders Hindenburg and Ludendorff, along with the Kaiser himself, concocted the idea that Germany <span class=\"c4\">could<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> have kept fighting, and won, but instead public commitment to the war wavered because of agitators on the home front and saboteurs who crippled military supply lines. \u00a0Usually, according to the conspiracy theory, those responsible were some combination of Jews and communists (and, of course, Jewish communists). \u00a0This was an outright lie, but it was a convenient lie that the political right in Germany could cling to, blaming \u201cJewish saboteurs\u201d and \u201cBolshevik agents\u201d for Germany\u2019s loss. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Versailles Treaty had also required Germany to disarm - the German army went from millions of men to a mere 100,000 soldiers. \u00a0It was forbidden from building heavy military equipment or having a fleet of more than a handful of warships. \u00a0Given the social prestige and power associated with the German military before the war, this was an enormous blow to German pride. \u00a0While the nations of Europe pledged to pursue peaceful resolutions to their problems in the future, many Germans were still left with a sense of vulnerability, particularly as the Bolsheviks cemented their control by the end of the 1920s in Russia.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Neither did the Weimar government itself inspire much confidence. Its parliament, the Reichstag, was trapped in an almost perpetual state of political deadlock. \u00a0Its constitution stipulated that voting was proportional, with the popular vote translated into a corresponding number of seats for the various political parties. \u00a0Unfortunately, given the vast range of political allegiances present in German society, there were fully thirty-two different parties, representing not just elements of the left - right political spectrum, but regional and religious identities as well. \u00a0 \u00a0The most powerful parties were those of the far left, the communists, and the far right, initially monarchists and conservative Catholics, with the Nazis rising to prominence at the end of the 1920s. \u00a0Thus, it was nearly impossible for the Reichstag to govern, with the various parties undermining one another\u2019s goals and coalition governments crumbling as swiftly as they formed.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image9.png\" alt=\"Chart of the electoral fortunes of the ten major political parties in Weimar Germany.\" width=\"800\" height=\"337\" \/> Diagram of electoral results over the course of the Weimar Republic. \u00a0Note the lack of a governing party, as well as the rise of the Nazis (the NSDAP, marked in dark maroon at the top of the diagram) to prominence in the last years of the Republic.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c1\">Simultaneously, the Weimar Republic faced ongoing economic issues, which fed into the resentment of most Germans toward the terms of the Versailles Treaty and its reparation payments (set to 132 billion gold marks annually, although that amount was renegotiated and lowered over the course of the decade). \u00a0The actual economic impact of those payments is still debated by historians; what is not debated is that Germans regarded them as utterly unjust, since they felt that <span class=\"c4\">all<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> of the countries of Europe were responsible for World War I, not just Germany. \u00a0Especially in moments of economic crisis, many otherwise \u201cordinary\u201d Germans looked to political extremists for possible solutions; to cite the most important example, the electoral fortunes of the Nazi party rose and fell in an inverse relationship to the health of the German economy.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The economy of Germany underwent a severe crisis less than five years after the end of the war. \u00a0In 1923, unable to make its payments, the Weimar government requested new negotiations. \u00a0The French responded by seizing the mineral-rich Ruhr Valley. \u00a0In order to pay striking workers, the government simply printed more money, thereby undermining its value. \u00a0This, in turn, led to hyperinflation: the German Mark simply collapsed as a currency, with one American dollar being worth nearly 10,000,000,000 marks by the end of the year. \u00a0Workers were paid in wheelbarrows full of cash at the start of their lunch break so they had time to buy a few groceries before inflation forced shopkeepers to raise prices by the afternoon.<\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"671\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image10.jpg\" alt=\"A stack of million-mark notes being written on as note paper.\" width=\"671\" height=\"461\" \/> Million-mark notes used as scratch paper during hyperinflation.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In the course of a year, Germans who had spent their lives carefully building up savings saw those savings rendered worthless. \u00a0This inspired anger and resentment among common people who might otherwise not be attracted to extremist solutions. \u00a0The situation stabilized in 1924 after emergency negotiations overseen by American banks resulted in a new stabilized currency, but for many people in Germany their experience of democracy thus far had been disastrous. \u00a0It was in this context of economic instability and political dysfunction that an extreme right-wing fringe group from the southern German state of Bavaria, the National Socialist German Workers Party, began to attract attention.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2><\/h2>\r\n16.5 The Nazis\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Any discussion of the Nazis must start with Adolf Hitler. \u00a0It is impossible to overstate Hitler's importance to <strong>Nazism<\/strong>: his own private obsessions became state policy and were used as the justification for war and genocide. \u00a0His unquestionable powers of public speaking and political maneuvering transformed the Nazis from a small fringe group to a major political party, and while he was largely ineffective as a practical decision-maker, he remained central to the image of strength, vitality, and power that the Nazis associated with their state. \u00a0Hitler was also one of the three \"greatest\" murderers of the twentieth century, along with Josef Stalin of the Soviet Union and Mao Tse-Tung of China. \u00a0His obsession with a racialized, murderous vision of German power translated directly into both the Holocaust of the European Jews and World War II itself. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Nothing about Hitler\u2019s biography would seem to suggest his rise to power, however. \u00a0Hitler was born in Austria in 1889, a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. \u00a0He dreamed of being an artist as a young man, but was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in the Austrian capital of Vienna \u2013 many of his works survive, depicting boring, uninspired, and moderately well-executed Austrian landscapes. \u00a0Listless and lazy, but convinced from adolescence of his own greatness, Hitler invented the idea that the rejection was due not to his own lack of talent, but because of a shadowy conspiracy that sought to undermine his rise to prominence. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">For several years before the outbreak of World War I, Hitler lived in Vienna in flophouses, cheap hotels for homeless men, and there he discovered right-wing politics and cultivated a growing hatred for Austria\u2019s ethnic and linguistic diversity. \u00a0Hitler spent his days drifting around Vienna, absorbing the rampant anti-Semitism of Austrian society and developing his own theories about Jews and other \u201cforeign\u201d influences. \u00a0Likewise, he read popular works of racist pseudo-scholarship that glorified a fabricated version of German history. \u00a0It was in Vienna that he discovered his own talent for public speaking, as well. \u00a0The first groups he held enraptured by his improvised speeches about German greatness and the Jewish (and Slavic) peril were his fellow flophouse residents. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Hitler regarded the fact that Germany and Austria were separate countries as a terrible historical error. \u00a0He hated the weak Austrian government and fled to Germany rather than serve his required military service in Austria. \u00a0Much to his delight, World War I broke out when he was already in Germany; he enthusiastically volunteered for the German army and served at the western front, surviving both a poison gas attack and shrapnel from an exploding shell. \u00a0Unlike most veterans of the war, Hitler experienced combat and service in the trenches as exhilarating and fulfilling, and he was completely without compassion - he would later shock his own generals during World War II by his callousness in spending German lives to achieve symbolic military objectives.<\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"567\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image60.jpg\" alt=\"Group of German soldiers, including Hitler, the latter with a longer mustache than he wore later.\" width=\"567\" height=\"499\" \/> Hitler, on the far right, and some of his fellow soldiers in his infantry regiment early in WWI. \u00a0He trimmed his moustache to its (in)famous length during the war in order to be able to securely wear a gas mask.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c1\"><span class=\"c3\">After the war, he was sent by the army to the southern German city of Munich, which was full of angry, disenchanted army veterans like himself. \u00a0His assignment was to investigate a small right-wing group, the German Workers Party. \u00a0His \u201cinvestigation\u201d immediately transformed into enthusiasm, finding like-minded conservatives who loathed the Weimar Republic and blamed socialism and something they called \u201cinternational Jewry\u201d for the defeat of Germany in the war. \u00a0He swiftly rose in the ranks of the Nazis, becoming the F\u00fchrer (\"Leader\") of the party in 1921 thanks to his outstanding command of oratory and his ability to browbeat would-be political opponents - he unceremoniously ejected the party\u2019s founder in the process. \u00a0Under Hitler\u2019s leadership, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party (\u201cNazi\u201d is derived from the German word for \u201cnational\u201d), and it adopted the swastika, long a favorite of racist pseudo-historians looking for the ancient roots of the fabricated \u201cAryan\u201d race, as its symbol.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">What made Nazi ideology distinct from that of their Italian Fascist counterparts was its emphasis on biology. \u00a0The Nazis believed that races were biological entities, that there was something inherent in the blood of each \"race\" that had a direct impact on its ability to create or destroy something as vague as \u201ctrue culture.\u201d \u00a0According to Nazi ideology, only the so-called Aryan race, Germans especially but also including related white northern Europeans like the Danes, the Norwegians, and the English, had ever created culture or been responsible for scientific progress. \u00a0Other races, including some non-European groups like the Persians and the Japanese, were considered \u201cculture-preserving\u201d races who could at least enjoy the benefits of true civilization. \u00a0At the bottom end of this invented hierarchy were \u201cculture-destroying\u201d races, most importantly Jews but also including Slavs, like Russians and Poles. \u00a0In the great scheme for the Nazi new world order, Jews would be somehow pushed aside entirely and the Slavs would be enslaved as manual labor for \"Aryans.\" <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">Hitler himself invented this crude scheme of racial potential, codifying it in his autobiography <em><span class=\"c4\">Mein Kampf<\/span><\/em><span class=\"c3\"> (see below). \u00a0He was obsessed with the idea that the German race teetered on the brink of extinction, tricked into accepting un-German concepts like democracy or communism and foolishly interbreeding with lesser races. \u00a0Behind all of this was, according to him, the Jews. \u00a0Hitler claimed that the Jews were responsible for every disaster in German history; the loss of World War I was just the latest in a long string of catastrophes for which the Jews were responsible. \u00a0The Jews had invented communism, capitalism, pacifism, liberalism, democracy...anything and everything that supposedly weakened Germany from Hitler\u2019s perspective.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">In 1921, under Hitler\u2019s leadership, the Nazis organized a paramilitary wing called the Stormtroopers (SA in their German acronym). \u00a0In 1923, inspired by the Italian Fascists' success in seizing power in Italy, Hitler led his fellow Nazis in an attempt to seize the regional government of the German region of Bavaria, of which Munich is the capital. This would-be revolution is remembered as the \u201cBeer-Hall Putsch.\u201d \u00a0It failed, but Hitler used his ensuing trial as a national stage, as the proceedings were widely reported on by the German press. \u00a0The court officials, who sympathized with his politics, gave him and his followers ludicrously short sentences in minimum security prisons, a sentence Hitler spent dictating his autobiography, <span class=\"c4\"><em>Mein Kampf<\/em> (\"<\/span><span class=\"c3\">My Struggle\"), to the Nazi party's secretary, Rudolf Hess.<\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"708\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image63.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of the major Nazi leaders after the Beer Hall Putsch, standing proudly in front of the courthouse and with their names labeled on the photo.\" width=\"708\" height=\"476\" \/> The Nazi leadership on trial - note the degree to which the photo looks like a publicity stunt rather than a criminal proceeding. \u00a0Hitler is joined by Erich Ludendorff, in the center, one of the top German commanders during WWI. \u00a0Ludendorff flirted with Nazism early on, but abandoned the party after the Beer Hall Putsch.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c1\"><span class=\"c3\">When he was released in nine months (including time served and recognition of his good behavior), Hitler was a minor national celebrity on the right. \u00a0The Nazis were still a fringe group, but they were now a fringe group that people had heard of. \u00a0Nazi Stormtroopers harassed leftist groups and engaged in brawls with communist militants. \u00a0The party created youth organizations, workers\u2019 and farmers\u2019 wings, and women\u2019s groups. \u00a0They held rallies constantly, creating early versions of \u201cinterest groups\u201d to gauge the issues that attracted the largest popular audience. \u00a0Even so, they did not have mass support in the 1920s - they only won 2.6% of the national vote in 1928. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Great Depression, however, threw the Weimar government and German society into such turmoil that extremists like the Nazis suddenly gained considerable mass appeal. \u00a0Promising the complete repudiation of the Versailles Treaty, the build-up of the German military, an end to economic problems, and a restoration of German pride and power, the Nazis steadily grew in popularity: an electoral breakthrough in 1930 saw them win 18% of the seats in the Reichstag. \u00a0In 1932 they won 37% of the national vote, the most they ever won in a free, legal election.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">That being noted, the Nazis never came close to winning an actual majority in the Reichstag. \u00a0They were essentially a strong, combative far-right minority party. \u00a0Thanks to the advent of the Depression, more \u201cordinary Germans\u201d than before were attracted to their message, but that message did not seem at the time to be greatly different than the messages of other right-wing parties. \u00a0That said, the Nazis <span class=\"c4\">were<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> masters of fine-tuning their messages for the electorate; most of their propaganda had to do with German pride, unity, and the need for social and economic order and prosperity, not the hatred of Jews or the need to launch attacks on other European nations. \u00a0They offered themselves as a solution to the inefficiency of the Weimar Republic, not as a potential bloodbath.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In fact, 1932 represented both the high point and what could have been the beginning of the decline of the Nazis as a party. \u00a0The presidential election that year saw Hitler lose to Hindenburg, who had served as president since 1925, despite his own contempt for democracy. \u00a0The Nazis lost millions of votes in the subsequent Reichstag election, and Hitler even briefly considered suicide. \u00a0Unfortunately, in January of 1933, Hindenburg was convinced by members of his cabinet led by a conservative Catholic politician, Franz von Papen, to use Hitler and the Nazis as tools to help dismantle the Weimar state and replace it with a more authoritarian political order. \u00a0Thus, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, the second-most powerful political position in the state. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Hitler seized the opportunity to launch a full-scale takeover of the German government. \u00a0The Reichstag building was set on fire by an unknown arsonist in February, and Hitler blamed the communists, pushing through an emergency measure (the \u201cReichstag Fire Decree\u201d) that suspended civil rights. \u00a0That allowed the state to destroy the German Communist Party, imprisoning 20,000 of its members in newly-built concentration camps. \u00a0Through voter fraud and massive intimidation by the Nazi Stormtroopers, new elections saw the Nazis win 49% in the next election. \u00a0 Soon, with the aid of other conservative parties, the Nazis pushed through the <strong>Enabling Act<\/strong>, which empowered Hitler and the presidential cabinet to pass laws by decree. \u00a0In July, the Nazis outlawed all parties except themselves. \u00a0By the summer of 1933, the Nazis controlled the state itself, with Hindenburg (impressed by Hitler\u2019s decisiveness) willingly signing off on their measures.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Nazi government that followed was a mess of overlapping bureaucracies with no clear areas of control, just influence. \u00a0The Weimar constitution was never officially repudiated, but the letter of laws became far less important than their interpretation according to the \u201cspirit\u201d of Nazism. \u00a0In lieu of a rational political order, there was a kind of governing principle that one Nazi party member described as \u201cworking towards the F\u00fchrer\u201d: trying to determine the \u201cspirit\u201d of Nazism and abiding by it rather than following specific rules or laws. \u00a0The only unshakable core principle was the personal supremacy of the F\u00fchrer, who was supposed to embody Nazism itself.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Nazism was not just a governing philosophy, however. \u00a0Hitler was obsessed with winning over \u201cordinary Germans\u201d to the party\u2019s outlook, and to that end the state both bombarded the population with propaganda and sought to alleviate the dismal economic situation of the early 1930s. \u00a0The Nazi state poured money into a debt-based recovery from the Depression (the economics of the recovery were totally unsustainable, but the Nazi leadership gambled that war would come before the inevitable economic collapse). \u00a0Employment recovered somewhat as the state funded huge public works and, after he publicly broke with the terms of the Versailles Treaty in 1935, rearmament. \u00a0Even though there were still food and consumable shortages, many Germans felt that things were better than they had been. \u00a0The Nazis refused to continue war reparations and soon the rapidly-rebuilding military was staging enormous public rallies.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">Ultimately, the Nazi party controlled Germany from 1933 until Germany surrendered to the Allies in World War II in 1945 - that period is remembered as that of the Third Reich, the Nazis\u2019 own term for what Hitler promised would be a \u201c1,000 years\u201d of German dominance. \u00a0During that time, the Nazis sponsored a full-scale attempt to recreate German culture and society to correspond with their vision of a racialized, warlike, and \u201cpurified\u201d German nation. \u00a0They claimed to have launched a \u201cnational revolution\u201d in the name of unifying all Germans in one <span class=\"c4\">Volksgemeinschaft<\/span><span class=\"c3\">: people\u2019s community. \u00a0<\/span><span style=\"color: #000000\">One way the Nazis \"purified\" the German nation was with the confiscation of artworks created during the Weimar Period. Nazi leadership denounced modern art as decadent and \"degenerate art.\" Thousands of pieces of art were removed from German public institutions and auctioned off to increase revenues for the party. In its place Hitler called for a new art form that portrayed ideals of militarism, Aryanism and German <em>Volk<\/em> culture. Art looting continued as Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and throughout World War Two. The Nazi leadership kept some confiscated artworks for their private collections, while others were sold to neutral countries like Switzerland to raise money for war materials.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<span style=\"text-align: initial;font-size: 1em\">The Nazis targeted almost every conceivable social group with a specific propaganda campaign and encouraged (or required) German citizens to join a specific Nazi league: workers were encouraged to work hard for the good of the state, women were encouraged to produce as many healthy children as possible (and to stay out of the workplace), boys were enrolled in a paramilitary scouting organization, <\/span><strong style=\"text-align: initial;font-size: 1em\">the Hitler Youth<\/strong><span style=\"text-align: initial;font-size: 1em\">, and girls in the League of German Girls, trained as future mothers and domestics. \u00a0All vocations and genders were united in the glorification of the military and, of course, of the F\u00fchrer himself (\u201cHeil Hitler\u201d was the official greeting used by millions of German citizens, whether or not they ever joined the Nazi party itself). \u00a0The purpose of the campaigns was to win the loyalty of the population to the regime and to Hitler personally, and nearly the entire population at least paid lip service to the new norms.<\/span>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"405\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image64.jpg\" alt=\"Young boys in the Hitler Youth throwing the Nazi salute with arms upstretched, with girls in the League of German Girls holding Nazi flags.\" width=\"405\" height=\"599\" \/> Hitler Youth and League of German Girls members at a rally in 1933.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">The dark side of both the propaganda and the legal framework of the Third Reich was the suspension of civil rights and the concomitant campaigns against the so-called \u201cenemies\u201d of the German people. \u00a0<\/span><span class=\"c3\">The Nazis vilified Jews, as well as other groups like people with disabilities and the <strong>Romani<\/strong> (better known as \u201cGypsies,\u201d although the term itself is something of an ethnic slur). \u00a0Starting in 1933, the state began a campaign of involuntary sterilizations of disabled and mixed-race peoples. \u00a0Jewish businesses were targeted for vandalism and Jewish people were attacked. \u00a0In 1935 the Nazis passed the so-called <strong>\u201cNuremberg Laws\u201d<\/strong> which outlawed Jews from working in various professions, stripped Jews of citizenship, and made sex between Jews and non-Jews a serious crime.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">Even as Germans were encouraged to identify with the Nazi state, and joining the Nazi Party itself soon became an excellent way to advance one's career, the Nazis also held out the threat of imprisonment or death for those who dared defy them. \u00a0The first concentration camp was opened within weeks of Hitler's appointment of chancellor in 1933, and a vast web of police forces soon monitored the German population. \u00a0The most important organization in Nazi Germany was the SS (<strong><span class=\"c4\">Schutzstaffel<\/span><\/strong><span class=\"c3\">, meaning \u201cprotection squadron\"), an enormous force of dedicated Nazis with almost unlimited police powers. \u00a0The SS had the right to hold anyone indefinitely, without trial, in \"protective custody\" in a concentration camp, and the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, were merely one part of the SS. \u00a0This combination of incentives (e.g. propaganda, programs, incentives) and threats (e.g. the SS, concentration camps) helps explain why there was no significant resistance to the Nazi regime from within Germany.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ol>\r\n \t<li>What were the major challenges faced by the Weimar Republic and what impact did these challenges have on German society and politics during the interwar period?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>What made the Nazi party different from other fascist parties already discussed in this chapter?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>How did the German government increase the popularity of the party with the German people?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Why is Stalin often compared to Hitler, and how are their legacies similar? What are some differences between the two leaders?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2 id=\"h.40ew0vw\" class=\"c18\"><span class=\"c22\">16.6 The Spanish Civil War<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The first real war launched by fascist forces was not in Italy or Germany, however, but in Spain. \u00a0The greatest of the European powers in the sixteenth century, Spain had long since sunk into obscurity, commercial weakness, and backwardness. \u00a0Its society in 1920 was very much like it had been a century earlier: most of the country was populated by poor rural farmers and laborers, and an alliance of the army, Catholic church, and old noble families still controlled the government in Madrid. \u00a0The king, Alfonso XIII, still held real power, despite his own personal ineptitude. \u00a0In many ways, Spain was the last place in Europe that clung to the old order of the nineteenth century.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Socialists and liberals were increasingly militant by the early 1920s, and Catalan and Basque nationalists likewise agitated for independence from Spain. \u00a0From 1923 to 1930, a general named Primo de Rivera acted as a virtual dictator (with the support of the king) trying to drag Spain into the twentieth century by building dams, roads, and sewers. \u00a0He weakened what representation there was in the state by making government ministers independent of the parliament (the Cortes) and he even managed to lose support in the army by interfering in the promotion of officers.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In 1931, the king abdicated after an anti-monarchist majority took the Cortes. \u00a0The result was a republic, whose parliament was dominated by liberals and moderate socialists. The parliament pushed through laws that formally separated church and state (for the first time in Spanish history) and redistributed land to the poor, seized from the enormous estates of the richest nobles. \u00a0Peasants in the countryside went further, attacking churches, convents, and the estates of the nobility. \u00a0Meanwhile, Spanish communists sought a Russian-style communist revolution and, even further to the left, a substantial anarchist coalition aimed at the complete abolition of government. \u00a0Thus, the left-center coalition was increasingly beleaguered, as the far left gravitated away and the nobility and clergy joined with the army in an anti-parliamentarian right. \u00a0Two years of anarchy resulted, from 1933 \u2013 1935.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In 1935, as the forces of the right rallied around a general named <strong>Francisco Franco<\/strong>, the socialists, liberals, anarchists, and communists formed a Popular Front to fight it. \u00a0More chaos ensued, with Franco\u2019s forces growing in power and the Popular Front suffering from infighting (i.e. the anarchists, communists, liberals, and nationalist minorities did not work well together). \u00a0Franco\u2019s traditional conservative forces joined with Spanish fascists, the Falange, and were soon openly supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. \u00a0In 1936, Franco\u2019s forces seized several key regions in Spain.<\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"480\"]<img class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image66.jpg\" alt=\"Francisco Franco offering the fascist salute to soldiers.\" width=\"480\" height=\"360\" \/> Francisco Franco[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">The war began in earnest in that year. \u00a0It was hugely bloody; probably about 600,000 people died, of which 200,000 were \u201cloyalists\u201d (the blanket term for the pro-republican, or at least anti-monarchical, forces) summarily executed after being captured by the \u201cnationalists\u201d under Franco. \u00a0Meanwhile, the loyalists carried out atrocities of their own, targeting especially members of the church. \u00a0One of the iconic moments in the war was the arrival of over 20,000 foreign volunteers on the side of the loyalists, including the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States. \u00a0Both the American writer Ernest Hemingway and the English writer George Orwell fought in defense of the republic.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">While, officially, there was an international non-interventionist agreement among the governments of Europe and the US with regards to Spain, Germany and Italy blatantly violated it and provided both troops and equipment to the nationalist forces. \u00a0The most effective support provided by Italy or Germany came from the German air force, the <span class=\"c4\">Luftwaffe<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, which used Spain as a training ground with real targets. \u00a0The loyalists had no means to fight against planes, so they suffered consistent defeats and setbacks from German bombing raids. \u00a0Overall, the <strong>Spanish Civil War<\/strong> allowed Italy and Germany to \"try out\" their new armies before committing to a larger war in Europe (Italy, however, did launch a brutal invasion of Ethiopia in 1934 as well).<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">The nationalists triumphed in early 1939, having cut off the pockets of loyalists off from one another. \u00a0They were recognized as the legitimate government of Spain internationally, and despite their promises to the contrary, they immediately began carrying out reprisals against the now-defeated loyalists. \u00a0Franco adopted the title of <span class=\"c4\">Caudillo<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, or leader, in the same manner as Mussolini and Hitler. \u00a0Where Spain differed from the other fascist powers was that Franco was well aware of its relative weakness and deliberately avoided an expansionist foreign policy; Hitler once spent a fruitless day trying to convince him to join the war once World War II was underway.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Franco\u2019s regime, which united the old nobles, the army, and the Catholic church, controlled the country until Franco\u2019s death in 1975. \u00a0Just as Spain was one of the last countries still tied to the old political order of kings and nobles after World War I, it was among the last fascistic countries long after Hitler\u2019s Germany and Mussolini\u2019s Italy had fallen.<\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ol>\r\n \t<li>What was the role of international intervention in the Spanish Civil War? How did countries like Germany and Italy become involved in the conflict?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>How did the Spanish Civil War impact the development of fascism in Europe and the world?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2>16.7 Working with Evidence<\/h2>\r\n<div class=\"textbox\">\r\n\r\n<strong>Source 1: Volume One, Chapter Eleven \"Nation and Race\" excerpt from <em>Mein Kampf<\/em><\/strong>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">{22} Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man....<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">{23}The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. . . .<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">{24}Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.<\/p>\r\n{25}No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, night be ruined with one blow.\r\n\r\n{26}Historical experience offers countless proofs of this. It shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people. North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this one example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture. The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood. . . .\r\n\r\n{27}If we pass all the causes of the German collapse in review, the ultimate and most decisive remains the failure to recognize the racial problem and especially the Jewish menace.\r\n\r\n{28}The defeats on the battlefield in August, 1918, would have been child's play to bear. They stood in no proportion to the victories of our people. It was not they that caused our downfall; no, it was brought about by that power which prepared these defeats by systematically over many decades robbing our people of the political and moral instincts and forces which alone make nations capable and hence worthy of existence.\r\n\r\n{29}The lost purity of the blood alone destroys inner happiness forever, plunges man into the abyss for all time, and the consequences can never more be eliminated from body and spirit.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"textbox\">\r\n\r\n<strong>Source 2: Mussolini's Speech-Broadcast, October 2, 1935<\/strong>\r\n\r\nBlackshirts of revolution, men and women of all Italy, Italians all over the world, beyond the mountains, beyond the seas, listen. A solemn hour is about to strike in the history of the country. Twenty million Italians are at this moment gathered in the squares of all Italy. It is the greatest demonstration that human history records. Twentymillions, one heart alone, one will alone, one decision.\r\n\r\nThis manifestation signIfies that the tie between Italy and fascism is perfect, absolute, unalterable. Only brains softened by puerile illusions, by sheer ignorance, can think differently, because they do not know what exactly is the Fascist Italy of 1935.\r\n\r\nFor many months the wheel of destiny and of the impulse of our calm determination moves toward the goal. In these last hours the rhythm has increased and nothing can stop it now.\r\n\r\nIt is not only an army marching towards its goal, but it is forty-four million Italians marching in unity behind this army. Because the blackest of injustices is being attempted against them, that of taking from them their place in the sun. When in 1915 Italy threw in her fate with that of the Allies, how many cries of admiration, how many promises were heard? But after the common victory, which cost Italy six hundred thousand dead, four hundred thousand lost, one million wounded, when peace was being discussed around the table only the crumbs of a rich colonial booty were left for us to pick up. For thirteen years we have been patient while the circle tightened around us at the hands of those who wish to suffocate us.\r\n\r\nWe have been patient with Ethiopia for forty years. It is enough now.\r\n\r\nThe League of Nations, instead of recognizing the rights of Italy, dares talk of sanctions, but until there is proof of the contrary, I refuse to believe that the authentic people of France will join in supporting sanctions against Italy. Six hundred thousand dead whose devotion was so heroic that the enemy commander justly admired them\u2014those fallen would now turn in their graves.\r\n\r\nAnd until there is proof to the contrary, I refuse to believe that the authentic people of Britain will want to spill blood and send Europe into a catastrophe for the sake of a barbarian country, unworthy of ranking among civilized nations. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to overlook the possible developments of tomorrow.\r\n\r\nTo economic sanctions, we shall answer with our discipline, our spirit of sacrifice, our obedience. To military sanctions, we shall answer with military measures. To acts of war, we shall answer with acts of war.\r\n\r\nA people worthy of their past and their name cannot and never will take a different stand. Let me repeat, in the most categorical manner, that the sacred pledge which I make at this moment, before all the Italians gathered together today, is that I shall do everything in my power to prevent a colonial conflict from taking on the aspect and weight of a European war.\r\n\r\nThis conflict may be attractive to certain minds which hope to avenge their disintegrated temples through this new catastrophe. Never, as at this historical hour, have the people of Italy revealed such force of character, and it is against this people to which mankind owes its greatest conquest, this people of heroes, of poets and saints, of navigators, of colonizers, that the world dares threaten sanctions.\r\n\r\nItaly! Italy!entirely and universally Fascist! The Italy of the blackshirt revolution, rise to your feet; let the cry of your determination rise to the skies and reach our soldiers in East Africa. Let it be a comfort to those who are about to fight. Let it be an encouragement to our friends and a warning to our enemies. It is the cry of Italy which goes beyond the mountains and the seas out into the great world. It is the cry of justice and of victory.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h3 class=\"c17\"><em><span class=\"c8 c4\">Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):<\/span><\/em><\/h3>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><span class=\"c10\"><a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:March_on_Rome.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960911000&amp;usg=AOvVaw35EqyhMNIzGl-t9gIx3uj2\">March on Rome<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Public Domain<\/span><span class=\"c10\">\r\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Weimarer_Republik.png&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960912000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3tuA5PI3Yvh0i1_b4k2nao\">Weimar Electoral Results<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Pass3456<\/span><span class=\"c10\">\r\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-00193,_Inflation,_Ein-Millionen-Markschein.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960913000&amp;usg=AOvVaw101vZXrOVgRTiXsmXduU9b\">Hyperinflation<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\">- Creative Commons License<\/span><span class=\"c10\">\r\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1974-082-44,_Adolf_Hitler_im_Ersten_Weltkrieg_retouched.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960914000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2buJfveSTqeYr7FqVW70Wt\">Hitler in WWI<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Creative Commons License<\/span><span class=\"c10\">\r\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-00344A,_M%25C3%25BCnchen,_nach_Hitler-Ludendorff_Prozess.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960914000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3C5f1AbvZvydEdP9xxaAf2\">Beer Hall Putsch<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Creative Commons License<\/span><span class=\"c10\">\r\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_147-0510,_Berlin,_Lustgarten,_Kundgebung_der_HJ.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960915000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2rTSxCoeorU31DhdvRyMHb\">Hitler Youth and League of German Girls<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Creative Commons License<\/span><span class=\"c10\">\r\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/Category:Francisco_Franco%23\/media\/File:CAUDILLO_FRANCISCO_FRANCO.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960916000&amp;usg=AOvVaw19AMl37HROgFrThwxHo_9o\">Franco<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\">- Creative Commons License\r\n<a href=\"http:\/\/Final German territorial losses after World War One - Creative Commons License\"> Final German territorial losses after World War One<\/a> - Creative Commons License<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<h3><em>For Further Reference:<\/em><\/h3>\r\n\"The Battle Over the Memory of the Spanish Civil War\" by Alex W. Palmer, Photographs by Mat\u00edas Costa,\u00a0<em>Smithsonian Magazine, July 2018. <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/battle-memory-spanish-civil-war-180969338\/\">https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/battle-memory-spanish-civil-war-180969338\/<\/a>\r\n\r\n<em>Economic Depression and the Dictators: Crash Course European History #37<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/thecrashcourse.com\/courses\/economic-depression-and-dictators-crash-course-european-history-37\/\">https:\/\/thecrashcourse.com\/courses\/economic-depression-and-dictators-crash-course-european-history-37\/<\/a>\r\n\r\n\"The Rise and Fall of Fascism\" at <em>The American Historical Association<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/about-aha-and-membership\/aha-history-and-archives\/gi-roundtable-series\/pamphlets\/em-18-what-is-the-future-of-italy-(1945)\/the-rise-and-fall-of-fascism\">https:\/\/www.historians.org\/about-aha-and-membership\/aha-history-and-archives\/gi-roundtable-series\/pamphlets\/em-18-what-is-the-future-of-italy-(1945)\/the-rise-and-fall-of-fascism<\/a>\r\n\r\n\"Nation and Race\" Volume One, Chapter Eleven, excerpt from <em>Mein Kampf, <a href=\"https:\/\/history.hanover.edu\/courses\/excerpts\/165hitler.html\">https:\/\/history.hanover.edu\/courses\/excerpts\/165hitler.html<\/a><\/em>\r\n\r\n\"Mussolini's Speech-Broadcast October 2, 1935\" from History Central, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.historycentral.com\/HistoricalDocuments\/Mussolini'sSpeech.html\">https:\/\/www.historycentral.com\/HistoricalDocuments\/Mussolini'sSpeech.html<\/a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<div class=\"textbox shaded\">\r\n\r\nThis chapter contains a remix of text from the following:\r\n\r\nThe main text is taken from Christopher Brooks, \"Chapter 9: Fascism\" in\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.nscc.ca\/worldhistory\" rel=\"cc:attributionURL\">Western Civilization: A Concise History<\/a> <\/em>Volume 3, licensed under a <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>.\r\n\r\nOriginal material in the text boxes, an introductory paragraph, and \"For Further References\" sections by Nicole V. Jobin, licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\"><img style=\"border-width: 0\" src=\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/80x15.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" \/><\/a>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Original material in section 16.5 \"The Nazis,\" the inclusion of a \"Working with Evidence\" section and the inclusion of references in the \"For Further Reference\" section by Meghan K. Bowe, licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div><\/div>","rendered":"<h2>16.1 Introduction<\/h2>\n<p>As we saw in the last chapter, the period following World War I was marked by significant social, economic, political, and cultural upheaval in Europe. The Treaty of Versailles had imposed punishing reparations on Germany and the Great Depression increased economic instability across Europe. As a result, new political movements emerged, including Fascism and the Nazi movement in Germany, which sought to address these instabilities through authoritarian governmental control. This complex and tumultuous period in European history had profound consequences not only for Europe but also for the world.<\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--examples\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\">Terms for Identification<\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ul>\n<li>Treaty of Versailles<\/li>\n<li>Fascism<\/li>\n<li>Aryan<\/li>\n<li>Duce<\/li>\n<li>Benito Mussolini<\/li>\n<li>Stab-in-the-back myth<\/li>\n<li>Weimar Republic<\/li>\n<li>Adolf Hitler<\/li>\n<li>Enabling Act<\/li>\n<li>Hitler Youth<\/li>\n<li><span class=\"c4\">Schutzstaffel<\/span><\/li>\n<li>Nazism<\/li>\n<li>Spanish Civil War<\/li>\n<li><span class=\"c3\">Francisco Franco<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 id=\"h.2250f4o\" class=\"c18\"><span class=\"c22\">16.2 Disappointment<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In many ways, World War I was what truly ended the nineteenth century. \u00a0It undermined the faith in progress that had grown, despite all of its setbacks, throughout the nineteenth century among many, perhaps most, Europeans. \u00a0The major political movements of the nineteenth century seemed to have succeeded: everywhere in Europe nations replaced empires (nationalism). \u00a0Europe controlled more of the world in 1920 than it ever had or ever would again (imperialism). \u00a0In the aftermath of the war, almost every government in Europe, even Germany, was a republican democracy based on the rule of law (liberalism). \u00a0Even socialists had cause to celebrate: there was a nominally Marxist state in Russia and socialist parties were powerful and militant all across Europe. \u00a0The old order of monarchs and nobles was rendered all but obsolete, with noble titles holding on as nothing more than archaic holdovers from the past in nearly every country. \u00a0In addition, of course, technology continued to advance apace.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">Despite the success of all of those movements, however, with all of the hopes and aspirations of their supporters over the last century, Europe had degenerated into a horrendous and costly war. \u00a0The war had <span class=\"c4\">not<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> purified and invigorated the great powers; they were all left reeling, weakened, and at a loss for how to prevent a future war. \u00a0Science had advanced, but its most noteworthy accomplishment was the production of more effective weapons. \u00a0The global empires remained, but the seeds of their dissolution were already present. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The results were bitterness and reprisals. \u00a0<strong>The Treaty of Versailles<\/strong> that ended the war imposed harsh penalties on Germany, returning Alsace and Lorraine to France and imposing a massive indemnity on the defeated country. \u00a0The Treaty also required Germany to accept the &#8220;war guilt clause,&#8221; in which it assumed full responsibility for the war having started in the first place. \u00a0Simultaneously, the Austrian Empire collapsed, with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the new Balkan nation of Yugoslavia all becoming independent countries and Austria a short-lived republic. \u00a0Almost no one would have believed that another &#8220;Great War&#8221; would occur in twenty years.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_266\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-266\" style=\"width: 591px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-266\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2023\/03\/German_losses_after_WWI.svg_.png\" alt=\"Map showing German territorial losses after World War One.\" width=\"591\" height=\"502\" srcset=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2023\/03\/German_losses_after_WWI.svg_.png 707w, https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2023\/03\/German_losses_after_WWI.svg_-300x255.png 300w, https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2023\/03\/German_losses_after_WWI.svg_-65x55.png 65w, https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2023\/03\/German_losses_after_WWI.svg_-225x191.png 225w, https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2023\/03\/German_losses_after_WWI.svg_-350x297.png 350w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 591px) 100vw, 591px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-266\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">German territorial losses after World War One. The territory in green was administered by the League of Nations.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In other words, World War I did not resolve any of the problems or international tensions that had started it. \u00a0Instead, it made them worse because it proved how powerful and devastating modern weapons were, and it also demonstrated that no single power was likely to be able to assert its dominance. \u00a0France and Britain went out of their way in blaming Germany for the conflict, while in Germany itself, those on the right believed in the conspiracy theory in which communists and Jews had conspired to sabotage the German war effort &#8211; this was later called the &#8220;Stab in the Back&#8221; myth. \u00a0Thus, many Germans felt they had been wronged twice: they had not \u201creally\u201d lost the war, yet they were forced to pay outrageous indemnities to the \u201cvictors.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">It was in this context of anger and disappointment that fascism and its racially-obsessed offshoot Nazism arose. \u00a0World War I provided the trauma, the bloodshed, and the skepticism toward liberalism and socialism that underwrote the rise of fascism. \u00a0Fascism was a modern conservatism, a conservatism that clung to its mania for order and hierarchy, but which did not seek a return to the days of feudalism and monarchy. \u00a0It was a populist movement, a movement of the people by the people, but instead of petty democratic bickering, it glorified the (imagined) nation, a nation united by a movement and an ethos. <\/span><\/p>\n<h2 id=\"h.haapch\" class=\"c18\"><span class=\"c22\">16.3 Fascism<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><strong>Fascism<\/strong> centered on the glorification of the state, the rejection of liberal individualism, and an incredible emphasis on hierarchy and authority. \u00a0Fascist movements sprung up right as the war ended. \u00a0The term fascism was invented by the Italian Fascist Party itself, based on the term <span class=\"c4\">fascii<\/span><span class=\"c3\">: a bundle of sticks with an axe embedded in the middle. \u00a0Symbolically, the sticks are weak individually but strong as a group, and the axe represented the power over life and death. \u00a0In ancient Rome, the bodyguards of the Roman consuls carried fascii as a badge of authority over war, peace, law, and death, and that symbolism appealed to the Italian Fascists.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">By the early 1920s, there were fascist movements in many European countries, all of them agitating for some kind of right-wing revolution against democracy and socialism. \u00a0One place of particular note in the early history of fascism was France. \u00a0There, a right-wing monarchist group called <span class=\"c4\">Actione Fran\u00e7aise<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> had existed since the Dreyfus Affair, but it transformed itself into a French fascist group despite still clinging to monarchist and traditional Catholic ideologies. \u00a0When Germany defeated France in World War II, the Nazis found a large contingent of right-wing Frenchmen who were all too happy to create a home-grown French fascist state (a fact that many in France tried their best to forget after the war). \u00a0Likewise, when the Nazis seized power in various places in Eastern Europe, they often found it expedient to simply work with or appoint the already-existing local fascist groups to power.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">Fascism was a twentieth-century phenomenon, but its ideological roots were firmly planted in the nineteenth century. \u00a0Mostly obviously, fascism was an extreme form of nationalism. \u00a0The nation was not just the home of a \u201cpeople\u201d in fascism, it was <span class=\"c4\">everything<\/span><span class=\"c3\">. \u00a0The nation became a mythic entity that had existed since the ancient past, and fascists claimed that the cultural traits and patterns of the nation defined who a person was and how they regarded the world. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The confusing jumble of what defined a nation in the first place often took on explicitly racial, and racist, terms among fascist groups. \u00a0Now, Germans were not just people who spoke German in Central Europe; they were the German (or \u201c<strong>Aryan<\/strong>,\u201d the term itself nothing more than a pseudo-scholarly jumble of linguistic history and racist nonsense) \u201crace.\u201d \u00a0French fascists talked about the bloodlines of the ancient Gauls that supposedly survived despite the \u201cpollution\u201d of the Roman invasions in the ancient past. Likewise, Mussolini and the Italian Fascists claimed that \u201cthe Italians\u201d were the direct descendants of the most glorious tradition of the ancient Roman Empire and were destined to create a new, even greater empire. \u00a0The pseudo-sciences of race had arisen in the late nineteenth century as perverse offshoots of genuine advances in biology and the natural sciences. \u00a0Fascism was, among other things, a cultural movement that found in \u201cscientific\u201d racism a profoundly compatible doctrine: the \u201cscientific\u201d proof in the rightness of the racial nation\u2019s rise to power.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">At first sight, one surprising aspect of fascism was that many fascists were former communists \u2013 <strong>Benito Mussolini,<\/strong> the leader of the Italian Fascist Party, had been a prominent member of the Italian Communist Party before World War I. \u00a0What fascism and communism had in common was a rejection of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. \u00a0They both sought transcendent political and social orders that went beyond \u201cmere\u201d parliamentary compromise. \u00a0The major difference between them was that fascists discovered in World War I that most people were not willing to die for their social class, but they were willing to die for their nation. \u00a0Fascism was, in part, a kind of collective movement that substituted nationalism for the class war. \u00a0All classes would be united in the nation, fascists believed, for the greater glory of the race and movement.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3 class=\"c17\"><span class=\"c22\">Italian Fascism<\/span><\/h3>\n<p class=\"c6\">As noted above, the very term \u201cfascist\u201d is a product of the first fascist group to seize control of a powerful country: the Italian Fascist Party. \u00a0Italian Fascism was an invention of Italian army veterans. \u00a0Most important among them was Benito Mussolini, a combat veteran who had welcomed the war as a cleansing, invigorating opportunity for Italy to grow into a more powerful nation. \u00a0He was deeply disappointed by its lackluster aftermath. \u00a0 Italy, having joined with England and France against Germany and Austria in hopes of seizing territory from the Austrians, was given very little land after the war. \u00a0Thus, to Mussolini and many other Italians, the war had been <span class=\"c4\">especially<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> pointless.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Fascists, who started out with a mere 100 members in the northern Italian city of Milan, grew rapidly because of the incredible social turmoil in Italy in 1919 and 1920. Italy had a powerful communist movement, one that was inspired by and linked to the Soviet Union\u2019s recent birth and the success of the communist revolution in Russia. After the war, a huge strike wave struck Italy and many poor Italians in the countryside seized land from the semi-feudal landlords who still dominated rural society. \u00a0There was genuine concern among traditional conservatives, the Church, business leaders, and the middle classes that Italy would undergo a communist revolution just as had occurred in Russia &#8211; at the time Russia was still in the midst of its civil war between the &#8220;Red&#8221; Bolsheviks and the anti-communist coalition known as the Whites. \u00a0By 1920 the Reds were clearly winning.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Fascists organized themselves into paramilitary units of thugs known as <strong>the Blackshirts<\/strong> (for their party-issued uniforms) and engaged in open street fighting against communists, breaking up strikes, attacking communist leaders, destroying communist newspaper offices, and intimidating voters from communist-leaning neighborhoods and communities. \u00a0They were often tacitly aided by the police, who rounded up communists but ignored Fascist lawbreaking as long as it was directed against the communists. \u00a0Likewise, business leaders started funding the Fascists as a kind of guarantee against further gains by communists. \u00a0Fascist politicians ran for office in the Italian parliament while their gangs of thugs terrorized the opposition.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">In 1922, the weak-willed King of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele III, appointed Mussolini Prime Minister, seeing in Mussolini a bulwark against the threat of communism (and caving in to the growing strength of the Fascist Party). \u00a0Fascists from all over Italy converged in a famous \u201cMarch on Rome,\u201d a highly staged piece of political theater meant to demonstrate Fascist unity and strength. \u00a0Mussolini then set out to destroy Italian democracy from within. \u00a0From 1922 to 1926 Mussolini and the Fascists manipulated the Italian parliament, intimidated political opponents or actually had them murdered, and succeeded finally in eliminating party politics and a free press. \u00a0The Fascist party became the only legal party in Italy and the police apparatus expanded dramatically. \u00a0Mussolini&#8217;s official title was <strong><span class=\"c4\">Il Duce<\/span><\/strong><span class=\"c3\">: &#8220;The Leader,&#8221; and his authority over every political decision was absolute. \u00a0The Fascist motto was \u201cbelieve, obey, fight,\u201d a distant parody of the French liberal motto (from the French Revolution) \u201cliberty, equality, fraternity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 635px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2023\/03\/image8-1.jpg\" alt=\"Mussolini standing in the midst of blackshirt Fascists.\" width=\"635\" height=\"474\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mussolini (in the center) and Fascist Blackshirts during the March on Rome in 1922.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">Mussolini immediately understood the importance of appearances. \u00a0The 1920s was the early age of mass media, especially radio, and an intrinsic part of fascism was public spectacle. \u00a0Mussolini staged enormous public exhibitions and rallies and he carefully controlled how he was portrayed in the media \u2013 the press was forbidden to mention his age or his birthday, to give the illusion that he never aged. \u00a0He was always on the move, usually in a race car, and usually accompanied by models, actresses, and socialites years his junior. \u00a0He spoke about his own &#8220;animal magnetism&#8221; and often walked around without a shirt on as a kind of (would be) herculean archetype. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Officially, Italian Fascism promised to end the class conflict that lay at the heart of socialist ideology by favoring what it called \u201ccorporatism\u201d over mere capitalism. \u00a0Corporatism was supposed to be a unified decision-making system in which workers and business owners would serve on joint committees to control work. \u00a0In fact, the owners derived all of the benefits; trade unions were banned and the plight of workers degenerated without representation. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">What Italian Fascism did do for the Italian people was essentially ideological and, in a sense, emotional: it directed youth movements and recreational clubs and sought the involvement of all Italians. \u00a0It glorified the <span class=\"c4\">idea <\/span>of the Italian people and in turn many <span class=\"c4\">actual <\/span><span class=\"c3\">Italians did come to feel great national pride, even if they were working in difficult conditions in a stagnant economy. \u00a0In turn, Fascist propaganda tried to inculcate Italian pride and Fascist identity among Italian citizens, while Fascist-led police forces targeted would-be dissidents, sentencing thousands to prison terms or internal exile in closed prison villages (not unlike some of the Russian gulags that would exemplify a different but related totalitarian system to the east).<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">While Mussolini was often praised in the foreign press, including in American newspapers and magazines, for accomplishments like making (a few) Italian trains run on time, in the long term the Fascist government proved to be inefficient and often outright ineffectual. \u00a0Mussolini himself, convinced of his own genius, made arbitrary and often foolish decisions, especially when it came to building up and training the Italian military. \u00a0The circle of Fascist leaders around him were largely corrupt sycophants who lied to Mussolini about Italy&#8217;s strength and prosperity to keep him happy. \u00a0When World War II began in 1939, the Italian forces were revealed to be poorly trained, equipped, and led.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ol>\n<li>What were the disappointments and disillusion that Europe faced at the end of World War I?<\/li>\n<li>What were the main ideals of Fascism and how was it a response to the trauma and skepticism of the post-war decades?<\/li>\n<li>How was fascism different from the political movements of the 19th century, and how did it shape society in the decades following World War I?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 id=\"h.319y80a\" class=\"c18\"><span class=\"c22\">16.4 The Weimar Republic<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">One place in Europe during the interwar period stands out as a microcosm of the political and cultural struggles occurring elsewhere: Weimar Germany. \u00a0Named after the resort town in which its constitution was written in early 1919, the <strong>Weimar Republic<\/strong> represented a triumphant culmination of liberalism. \u00a0Its constitution guaranteed universal suffrage for men and women, fundamental human rights, and the complete rejection of the remnants of monarchism. \u00a0Unfortunately, the government of the new republic was deeply unpopular among many groups, including right-wing army veterans like a young <strong>Adolf Hitler.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">One great lie that poisoned the political climate of the Weimar Republic was, as mentioned above, <strong>the \u201cstab-in-the-back\u201d myth<\/strong>. \u00a0Toward the end of World War I, Germany was losing. \u00a0Its own General Staff informed the Kaiser of this fact; with American troops and munitions flooding in, it was simply a matter of time before the Allies were able to march in force on Germany. \u00a0As defeat loomed, however, the military leaders Hindenburg and Ludendorff, along with the Kaiser himself, concocted the idea that Germany <span class=\"c4\">could<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> have kept fighting, and won, but instead public commitment to the war wavered because of agitators on the home front and saboteurs who crippled military supply lines. \u00a0Usually, according to the conspiracy theory, those responsible were some combination of Jews and communists (and, of course, Jewish communists). \u00a0This was an outright lie, but it was a convenient lie that the political right in Germany could cling to, blaming \u201cJewish saboteurs\u201d and \u201cBolshevik agents\u201d for Germany\u2019s loss. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Versailles Treaty had also required Germany to disarm &#8211; the German army went from millions of men to a mere 100,000 soldiers. \u00a0It was forbidden from building heavy military equipment or having a fleet of more than a handful of warships. \u00a0Given the social prestige and power associated with the German military before the war, this was an enormous blow to German pride. \u00a0While the nations of Europe pledged to pursue peaceful resolutions to their problems in the future, many Germans were still left with a sense of vulnerability, particularly as the Bolsheviks cemented their control by the end of the 1920s in Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Neither did the Weimar government itself inspire much confidence. Its parliament, the Reichstag, was trapped in an almost perpetual state of political deadlock. \u00a0Its constitution stipulated that voting was proportional, with the popular vote translated into a corresponding number of seats for the various political parties. \u00a0Unfortunately, given the vast range of political allegiances present in German society, there were fully thirty-two different parties, representing not just elements of the left &#8211; right political spectrum, but regional and religious identities as well. \u00a0 \u00a0The most powerful parties were those of the far left, the communists, and the far right, initially monarchists and conservative Catholics, with the Nazis rising to prominence at the end of the 1920s. \u00a0Thus, it was nearly impossible for the Reichstag to govern, with the various parties undermining one another\u2019s goals and coalition governments crumbling as swiftly as they formed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 800px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image9.png\" alt=\"Chart of the electoral fortunes of the ten major political parties in Weimar Germany.\" width=\"800\" height=\"337\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Diagram of electoral results over the course of the Weimar Republic. \u00a0Note the lack of a governing party, as well as the rise of the Nazis (the NSDAP, marked in dark maroon at the top of the diagram) to prominence in the last years of the Republic.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c1\">Simultaneously, the Weimar Republic faced ongoing economic issues, which fed into the resentment of most Germans toward the terms of the Versailles Treaty and its reparation payments (set to 132 billion gold marks annually, although that amount was renegotiated and lowered over the course of the decade). \u00a0The actual economic impact of those payments is still debated by historians; what is not debated is that Germans regarded them as utterly unjust, since they felt that <span class=\"c4\">all<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> of the countries of Europe were responsible for World War I, not just Germany. \u00a0Especially in moments of economic crisis, many otherwise \u201cordinary\u201d Germans looked to political extremists for possible solutions; to cite the most important example, the electoral fortunes of the Nazi party rose and fell in an inverse relationship to the health of the German economy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The economy of Germany underwent a severe crisis less than five years after the end of the war. \u00a0In 1923, unable to make its payments, the Weimar government requested new negotiations. \u00a0The French responded by seizing the mineral-rich Ruhr Valley. \u00a0In order to pay striking workers, the government simply printed more money, thereby undermining its value. \u00a0This, in turn, led to hyperinflation: the German Mark simply collapsed as a currency, with one American dollar being worth nearly 10,000,000,000 marks by the end of the year. \u00a0Workers were paid in wheelbarrows full of cash at the start of their lunch break so they had time to buy a few groceries before inflation forced shopkeepers to raise prices by the afternoon.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 671px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image10.jpg\" alt=\"A stack of million-mark notes being written on as note paper.\" width=\"671\" height=\"461\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Million-mark notes used as scratch paper during hyperinflation.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In the course of a year, Germans who had spent their lives carefully building up savings saw those savings rendered worthless. \u00a0This inspired anger and resentment among common people who might otherwise not be attracted to extremist solutions. \u00a0The situation stabilized in 1924 after emergency negotiations overseen by American banks resulted in a new stabilized currency, but for many people in Germany their experience of democracy thus far had been disastrous. \u00a0It was in this context of economic instability and political dysfunction that an extreme right-wing fringe group from the southern German state of Bavaria, the National Socialist German Workers Party, began to attract attention.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><\/h2>\n<p>16.5 The Nazis<\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Any discussion of the Nazis must start with Adolf Hitler. \u00a0It is impossible to overstate Hitler&#8217;s importance to <strong>Nazism<\/strong>: his own private obsessions became state policy and were used as the justification for war and genocide. \u00a0His unquestionable powers of public speaking and political maneuvering transformed the Nazis from a small fringe group to a major political party, and while he was largely ineffective as a practical decision-maker, he remained central to the image of strength, vitality, and power that the Nazis associated with their state. \u00a0Hitler was also one of the three &#8220;greatest&#8221; murderers of the twentieth century, along with Josef Stalin of the Soviet Union and Mao Tse-Tung of China. \u00a0His obsession with a racialized, murderous vision of German power translated directly into both the Holocaust of the European Jews and World War II itself. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Nothing about Hitler\u2019s biography would seem to suggest his rise to power, however. \u00a0Hitler was born in Austria in 1889, a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. \u00a0He dreamed of being an artist as a young man, but was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in the Austrian capital of Vienna \u2013 many of his works survive, depicting boring, uninspired, and moderately well-executed Austrian landscapes. \u00a0Listless and lazy, but convinced from adolescence of his own greatness, Hitler invented the idea that the rejection was due not to his own lack of talent, but because of a shadowy conspiracy that sought to undermine his rise to prominence. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">For several years before the outbreak of World War I, Hitler lived in Vienna in flophouses, cheap hotels for homeless men, and there he discovered right-wing politics and cultivated a growing hatred for Austria\u2019s ethnic and linguistic diversity. \u00a0Hitler spent his days drifting around Vienna, absorbing the rampant anti-Semitism of Austrian society and developing his own theories about Jews and other \u201cforeign\u201d influences. \u00a0Likewise, he read popular works of racist pseudo-scholarship that glorified a fabricated version of German history. \u00a0It was in Vienna that he discovered his own talent for public speaking, as well. \u00a0The first groups he held enraptured by his improvised speeches about German greatness and the Jewish (and Slavic) peril were his fellow flophouse residents. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Hitler regarded the fact that Germany and Austria were separate countries as a terrible historical error. \u00a0He hated the weak Austrian government and fled to Germany rather than serve his required military service in Austria. \u00a0Much to his delight, World War I broke out when he was already in Germany; he enthusiastically volunteered for the German army and served at the western front, surviving both a poison gas attack and shrapnel from an exploding shell. \u00a0Unlike most veterans of the war, Hitler experienced combat and service in the trenches as exhilarating and fulfilling, and he was completely without compassion &#8211; he would later shock his own generals during World War II by his callousness in spending German lives to achieve symbolic military objectives.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 567px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image60.jpg\" alt=\"Group of German soldiers, including Hitler, the latter with a longer mustache than he wore later.\" width=\"567\" height=\"499\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Hitler, on the far right, and some of his fellow soldiers in his infantry regiment early in WWI. \u00a0He trimmed his moustache to its (in)famous length during the war in order to be able to securely wear a gas mask.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c1\"><span class=\"c3\">After the war, he was sent by the army to the southern German city of Munich, which was full of angry, disenchanted army veterans like himself. \u00a0His assignment was to investigate a small right-wing group, the German Workers Party. \u00a0His \u201cinvestigation\u201d immediately transformed into enthusiasm, finding like-minded conservatives who loathed the Weimar Republic and blamed socialism and something they called \u201cinternational Jewry\u201d for the defeat of Germany in the war. \u00a0He swiftly rose in the ranks of the Nazis, becoming the F\u00fchrer (&#8220;Leader&#8221;) of the party in 1921 thanks to his outstanding command of oratory and his ability to browbeat would-be political opponents &#8211; he unceremoniously ejected the party\u2019s founder in the process. \u00a0Under Hitler\u2019s leadership, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party (\u201cNazi\u201d is derived from the German word for \u201cnational\u201d), and it adopted the swastika, long a favorite of racist pseudo-historians looking for the ancient roots of the fabricated \u201cAryan\u201d race, as its symbol.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">What made Nazi ideology distinct from that of their Italian Fascist counterparts was its emphasis on biology. \u00a0The Nazis believed that races were biological entities, that there was something inherent in the blood of each &#8220;race&#8221; that had a direct impact on its ability to create or destroy something as vague as \u201ctrue culture.\u201d \u00a0According to Nazi ideology, only the so-called Aryan race, Germans especially but also including related white northern Europeans like the Danes, the Norwegians, and the English, had ever created culture or been responsible for scientific progress. \u00a0Other races, including some non-European groups like the Persians and the Japanese, were considered \u201cculture-preserving\u201d races who could at least enjoy the benefits of true civilization. \u00a0At the bottom end of this invented hierarchy were \u201cculture-destroying\u201d races, most importantly Jews but also including Slavs, like Russians and Poles. \u00a0In the great scheme for the Nazi new world order, Jews would be somehow pushed aside entirely and the Slavs would be enslaved as manual labor for &#8220;Aryans.&#8221; <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">Hitler himself invented this crude scheme of racial potential, codifying it in his autobiography <em><span class=\"c4\">Mein Kampf<\/span><\/em><span class=\"c3\"> (see below). \u00a0He was obsessed with the idea that the German race teetered on the brink of extinction, tricked into accepting un-German concepts like democracy or communism and foolishly interbreeding with lesser races. \u00a0Behind all of this was, according to him, the Jews. \u00a0Hitler claimed that the Jews were responsible for every disaster in German history; the loss of World War I was just the latest in a long string of catastrophes for which the Jews were responsible. \u00a0The Jews had invented communism, capitalism, pacifism, liberalism, democracy&#8230;anything and everything that supposedly weakened Germany from Hitler\u2019s perspective.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">In 1921, under Hitler\u2019s leadership, the Nazis organized a paramilitary wing called the Stormtroopers (SA in their German acronym). \u00a0In 1923, inspired by the Italian Fascists&#8217; success in seizing power in Italy, Hitler led his fellow Nazis in an attempt to seize the regional government of the German region of Bavaria, of which Munich is the capital. This would-be revolution is remembered as the \u201cBeer-Hall Putsch.\u201d \u00a0It failed, but Hitler used his ensuing trial as a national stage, as the proceedings were widely reported on by the German press. \u00a0The court officials, who sympathized with his politics, gave him and his followers ludicrously short sentences in minimum security prisons, a sentence Hitler spent dictating his autobiography, <span class=\"c4\"><em>Mein Kampf<\/em> (&#8220;<\/span><span class=\"c3\">My Struggle&#8221;), to the Nazi party&#8217;s secretary, Rudolf Hess.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 708px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image63.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of the major Nazi leaders after the Beer Hall Putsch, standing proudly in front of the courthouse and with their names labeled on the photo.\" width=\"708\" height=\"476\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Nazi leadership on trial &#8211; note the degree to which the photo looks like a publicity stunt rather than a criminal proceeding. \u00a0Hitler is joined by Erich Ludendorff, in the center, one of the top German commanders during WWI. \u00a0Ludendorff flirted with Nazism early on, but abandoned the party after the Beer Hall Putsch.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c1\"><span class=\"c3\">When he was released in nine months (including time served and recognition of his good behavior), Hitler was a minor national celebrity on the right. \u00a0The Nazis were still a fringe group, but they were now a fringe group that people had heard of. \u00a0Nazi Stormtroopers harassed leftist groups and engaged in brawls with communist militants. \u00a0The party created youth organizations, workers\u2019 and farmers\u2019 wings, and women\u2019s groups. \u00a0They held rallies constantly, creating early versions of \u201cinterest groups\u201d to gauge the issues that attracted the largest popular audience. \u00a0Even so, they did not have mass support in the 1920s &#8211; they only won 2.6% of the national vote in 1928. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Great Depression, however, threw the Weimar government and German society into such turmoil that extremists like the Nazis suddenly gained considerable mass appeal. \u00a0Promising the complete repudiation of the Versailles Treaty, the build-up of the German military, an end to economic problems, and a restoration of German pride and power, the Nazis steadily grew in popularity: an electoral breakthrough in 1930 saw them win 18% of the seats in the Reichstag. \u00a0In 1932 they won 37% of the national vote, the most they ever won in a free, legal election.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">That being noted, the Nazis never came close to winning an actual majority in the Reichstag. \u00a0They were essentially a strong, combative far-right minority party. \u00a0Thanks to the advent of the Depression, more \u201cordinary Germans\u201d than before were attracted to their message, but that message did not seem at the time to be greatly different than the messages of other right-wing parties. \u00a0That said, the Nazis <span class=\"c4\">were<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> masters of fine-tuning their messages for the electorate; most of their propaganda had to do with German pride, unity, and the need for social and economic order and prosperity, not the hatred of Jews or the need to launch attacks on other European nations. \u00a0They offered themselves as a solution to the inefficiency of the Weimar Republic, not as a potential bloodbath.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In fact, 1932 represented both the high point and what could have been the beginning of the decline of the Nazis as a party. \u00a0The presidential election that year saw Hitler lose to Hindenburg, who had served as president since 1925, despite his own contempt for democracy. \u00a0The Nazis lost millions of votes in the subsequent Reichstag election, and Hitler even briefly considered suicide. \u00a0Unfortunately, in January of 1933, Hindenburg was convinced by members of his cabinet led by a conservative Catholic politician, Franz von Papen, to use Hitler and the Nazis as tools to help dismantle the Weimar state and replace it with a more authoritarian political order. \u00a0Thus, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, the second-most powerful political position in the state. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Hitler seized the opportunity to launch a full-scale takeover of the German government. \u00a0The Reichstag building was set on fire by an unknown arsonist in February, and Hitler blamed the communists, pushing through an emergency measure (the \u201cReichstag Fire Decree\u201d) that suspended civil rights. \u00a0That allowed the state to destroy the German Communist Party, imprisoning 20,000 of its members in newly-built concentration camps. \u00a0Through voter fraud and massive intimidation by the Nazi Stormtroopers, new elections saw the Nazis win 49% in the next election. \u00a0 Soon, with the aid of other conservative parties, the Nazis pushed through the <strong>Enabling Act<\/strong>, which empowered Hitler and the presidential cabinet to pass laws by decree. \u00a0In July, the Nazis outlawed all parties except themselves. \u00a0By the summer of 1933, the Nazis controlled the state itself, with Hindenburg (impressed by Hitler\u2019s decisiveness) willingly signing off on their measures.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Nazi government that followed was a mess of overlapping bureaucracies with no clear areas of control, just influence. \u00a0The Weimar constitution was never officially repudiated, but the letter of laws became far less important than their interpretation according to the \u201cspirit\u201d of Nazism. \u00a0In lieu of a rational political order, there was a kind of governing principle that one Nazi party member described as \u201cworking towards the F\u00fchrer\u201d: trying to determine the \u201cspirit\u201d of Nazism and abiding by it rather than following specific rules or laws. \u00a0The only unshakable core principle was the personal supremacy of the F\u00fchrer, who was supposed to embody Nazism itself.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Nazism was not just a governing philosophy, however. \u00a0Hitler was obsessed with winning over \u201cordinary Germans\u201d to the party\u2019s outlook, and to that end the state both bombarded the population with propaganda and sought to alleviate the dismal economic situation of the early 1930s. \u00a0The Nazi state poured money into a debt-based recovery from the Depression (the economics of the recovery were totally unsustainable, but the Nazi leadership gambled that war would come before the inevitable economic collapse). \u00a0Employment recovered somewhat as the state funded huge public works and, after he publicly broke with the terms of the Versailles Treaty in 1935, rearmament. \u00a0Even though there were still food and consumable shortages, many Germans felt that things were better than they had been. \u00a0The Nazis refused to continue war reparations and soon the rapidly-rebuilding military was staging enormous public rallies.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">Ultimately, the Nazi party controlled Germany from 1933 until Germany surrendered to the Allies in World War II in 1945 &#8211; that period is remembered as that of the Third Reich, the Nazis\u2019 own term for what Hitler promised would be a \u201c1,000 years\u201d of German dominance. \u00a0During that time, the Nazis sponsored a full-scale attempt to recreate German culture and society to correspond with their vision of a racialized, warlike, and \u201cpurified\u201d German nation. \u00a0They claimed to have launched a \u201cnational revolution\u201d in the name of unifying all Germans in one <span class=\"c4\">Volksgemeinschaft<\/span><span class=\"c3\">: people\u2019s community. \u00a0<\/span><span style=\"color: #000000\">One way the Nazis &#8220;purified&#8221; the German nation was with the confiscation of artworks created during the Weimar Period. Nazi leadership denounced modern art as decadent and &#8220;degenerate art.&#8221; Thousands of pieces of art were removed from German public institutions and auctioned off to increase revenues for the party. In its place Hitler called for a new art form that portrayed ideals of militarism, Aryanism and German <em>Volk<\/em> culture. Art looting continued as Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and throughout World War Two. The Nazi leadership kept some confiscated artworks for their private collections, while others were sold to neutral countries like Switzerland to raise money for war materials.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-align: initial;font-size: 1em\">The Nazis targeted almost every conceivable social group with a specific propaganda campaign and encouraged (or required) German citizens to join a specific Nazi league: workers were encouraged to work hard for the good of the state, women were encouraged to produce as many healthy children as possible (and to stay out of the workplace), boys were enrolled in a paramilitary scouting organization, <\/span><strong style=\"text-align: initial;font-size: 1em\">the Hitler Youth<\/strong><span style=\"text-align: initial;font-size: 1em\">, and girls in the League of German Girls, trained as future mothers and domestics. \u00a0All vocations and genders were united in the glorification of the military and, of course, of the F\u00fchrer himself (\u201cHeil Hitler\u201d was the official greeting used by millions of German citizens, whether or not they ever joined the Nazi party itself). \u00a0The purpose of the campaigns was to win the loyalty of the population to the regime and to Hitler personally, and nearly the entire population at least paid lip service to the new norms.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 405px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image64.jpg\" alt=\"Young boys in the Hitler Youth throwing the Nazi salute with arms upstretched, with girls in the League of German Girls holding Nazi flags.\" width=\"405\" height=\"599\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Hitler Youth and League of German Girls members at a rally in 1933.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">The dark side of both the propaganda and the legal framework of the Third Reich was the suspension of civil rights and the concomitant campaigns against the so-called \u201cenemies\u201d of the German people. \u00a0<\/span><span class=\"c3\">The Nazis vilified Jews, as well as other groups like people with disabilities and the <strong>Romani<\/strong> (better known as \u201cGypsies,\u201d although the term itself is something of an ethnic slur). \u00a0Starting in 1933, the state began a campaign of involuntary sterilizations of disabled and mixed-race peoples. \u00a0Jewish businesses were targeted for vandalism and Jewish people were attacked. \u00a0In 1935 the Nazis passed the so-called <strong>\u201cNuremberg Laws\u201d<\/strong> which outlawed Jews from working in various professions, stripped Jews of citizenship, and made sex between Jews and non-Jews a serious crime.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">Even as Germans were encouraged to identify with the Nazi state, and joining the Nazi Party itself soon became an excellent way to advance one&#8217;s career, the Nazis also held out the threat of imprisonment or death for those who dared defy them. \u00a0The first concentration camp was opened within weeks of Hitler&#8217;s appointment of chancellor in 1933, and a vast web of police forces soon monitored the German population. \u00a0The most important organization in Nazi Germany was the SS (<strong><span class=\"c4\">Schutzstaffel<\/span><\/strong><span class=\"c3\">, meaning \u201cprotection squadron&#8221;), an enormous force of dedicated Nazis with almost unlimited police powers. \u00a0The SS had the right to hold anyone indefinitely, without trial, in &#8220;protective custody&#8221; in a concentration camp, and the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, were merely one part of the SS. \u00a0This combination of incentives (e.g. propaganda, programs, incentives) and threats (e.g. the SS, concentration camps) helps explain why there was no significant resistance to the Nazi regime from within Germany.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ol>\n<li>What were the major challenges faced by the Weimar Republic and what impact did these challenges have on German society and politics during the interwar period?<\/li>\n<li>What made the Nazi party different from other fascist parties already discussed in this chapter?<\/li>\n<li>How did the German government increase the popularity of the party with the German people?<\/li>\n<li>Why is Stalin often compared to Hitler, and how are their legacies similar? What are some differences between the two leaders?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 id=\"h.40ew0vw\" class=\"c18\"><span class=\"c22\">16.6 The Spanish Civil War<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The first real war launched by fascist forces was not in Italy or Germany, however, but in Spain. \u00a0The greatest of the European powers in the sixteenth century, Spain had long since sunk into obscurity, commercial weakness, and backwardness. \u00a0Its society in 1920 was very much like it had been a century earlier: most of the country was populated by poor rural farmers and laborers, and an alliance of the army, Catholic church, and old noble families still controlled the government in Madrid. \u00a0The king, Alfonso XIII, still held real power, despite his own personal ineptitude. \u00a0In many ways, Spain was the last place in Europe that clung to the old order of the nineteenth century.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Socialists and liberals were increasingly militant by the early 1920s, and Catalan and Basque nationalists likewise agitated for independence from Spain. \u00a0From 1923 to 1930, a general named Primo de Rivera acted as a virtual dictator (with the support of the king) trying to drag Spain into the twentieth century by building dams, roads, and sewers. \u00a0He weakened what representation there was in the state by making government ministers independent of the parliament (the Cortes) and he even managed to lose support in the army by interfering in the promotion of officers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In 1931, the king abdicated after an anti-monarchist majority took the Cortes. \u00a0The result was a republic, whose parliament was dominated by liberals and moderate socialists. The parliament pushed through laws that formally separated church and state (for the first time in Spanish history) and redistributed land to the poor, seized from the enormous estates of the richest nobles. \u00a0Peasants in the countryside went further, attacking churches, convents, and the estates of the nobility. \u00a0Meanwhile, Spanish communists sought a Russian-style communist revolution and, even further to the left, a substantial anarchist coalition aimed at the complete abolition of government. \u00a0Thus, the left-center coalition was increasingly beleaguered, as the far left gravitated away and the nobility and clergy joined with the army in an anti-parliamentarian right. \u00a0Two years of anarchy resulted, from 1933 \u2013 1935.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In 1935, as the forces of the right rallied around a general named <strong>Francisco Franco<\/strong>, the socialists, liberals, anarchists, and communists formed a Popular Front to fight it. \u00a0More chaos ensued, with Franco\u2019s forces growing in power and the Popular Front suffering from infighting (i.e. the anarchists, communists, liberals, and nationalist minorities did not work well together). \u00a0Franco\u2019s traditional conservative forces joined with Spanish fascists, the Falange, and were soon openly supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. \u00a0In 1936, Franco\u2019s forces seized several key regions in Spain.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 480px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image66.jpg\" alt=\"Francisco Franco offering the fascist salute to soldiers.\" width=\"480\" height=\"360\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Francisco Franco<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">The war began in earnest in that year. \u00a0It was hugely bloody; probably about 600,000 people died, of which 200,000 were \u201cloyalists\u201d (the blanket term for the pro-republican, or at least anti-monarchical, forces) summarily executed after being captured by the \u201cnationalists\u201d under Franco. \u00a0Meanwhile, the loyalists carried out atrocities of their own, targeting especially members of the church. \u00a0One of the iconic moments in the war was the arrival of over 20,000 foreign volunteers on the side of the loyalists, including the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States. \u00a0Both the American writer Ernest Hemingway and the English writer George Orwell fought in defense of the republic.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">While, officially, there was an international non-interventionist agreement among the governments of Europe and the US with regards to Spain, Germany and Italy blatantly violated it and provided both troops and equipment to the nationalist forces. \u00a0The most effective support provided by Italy or Germany came from the German air force, the <span class=\"c4\">Luftwaffe<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, which used Spain as a training ground with real targets. \u00a0The loyalists had no means to fight against planes, so they suffered consistent defeats and setbacks from German bombing raids. \u00a0Overall, the <strong>Spanish Civil War<\/strong> allowed Italy and Germany to &#8220;try out&#8221; their new armies before committing to a larger war in Europe (Italy, however, did launch a brutal invasion of Ethiopia in 1934 as well).<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">The nationalists triumphed in early 1939, having cut off the pockets of loyalists off from one another. \u00a0They were recognized as the legitimate government of Spain internationally, and despite their promises to the contrary, they immediately began carrying out reprisals against the now-defeated loyalists. \u00a0Franco adopted the title of <span class=\"c4\">Caudillo<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, or leader, in the same manner as Mussolini and Hitler. \u00a0Where Spain differed from the other fascist powers was that Franco was well aware of its relative weakness and deliberately avoided an expansionist foreign policy; Hitler once spent a fruitless day trying to convince him to join the war once World War II was underway.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Franco\u2019s regime, which united the old nobles, the army, and the Catholic church, controlled the country until Franco\u2019s death in 1975. \u00a0Just as Spain was one of the last countries still tied to the old political order of kings and nobles after World War I, it was among the last fascistic countries long after Hitler\u2019s Germany and Mussolini\u2019s Italy had fallen.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ol>\n<li>What was the role of international intervention in the Spanish Civil War? How did countries like Germany and Italy become involved in the conflict?<\/li>\n<li>How did the Spanish Civil War impact the development of fascism in Europe and the world?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2>16.7 Working with Evidence<\/h2>\n<div class=\"textbox\">\n<p><strong>Source 1: Volume One, Chapter Eleven &#8220;Nation and Race&#8221; excerpt from <em>Mein Kampf<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">{22} Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">{23}The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. . . .<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">{24}Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species&#8217; health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.<\/p>\n<p>{25}No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, night be ruined with one blow.<\/p>\n<p>{26}Historical experience offers countless proofs of this. It shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people. North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this one example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture. The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood. . . .<\/p>\n<p>{27}If we pass all the causes of the German collapse in review, the ultimate and most decisive remains the failure to recognize the racial problem and especially the Jewish menace.<\/p>\n<p>{28}The defeats on the battlefield in August, 1918, would have been child&#8217;s play to bear. They stood in no proportion to the victories of our people. It was not they that caused our downfall; no, it was brought about by that power which prepared these defeats by systematically over many decades robbing our people of the political and moral instincts and forces which alone make nations capable and hence worthy of existence.<\/p>\n<p>{29}The lost purity of the blood alone destroys inner happiness forever, plunges man into the abyss for all time, and the consequences can never more be eliminated from body and spirit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"textbox\">\n<p><strong>Source 2: Mussolini&#8217;s Speech-Broadcast, October 2, 1935<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Blackshirts of revolution, men and women of all Italy, Italians all over the world, beyond the mountains, beyond the seas, listen. A solemn hour is about to strike in the history of the country. Twenty million Italians are at this moment gathered in the squares of all Italy. It is the greatest demonstration that human history records. Twentymillions, one heart alone, one will alone, one decision.<\/p>\n<p>This manifestation signIfies that the tie between Italy and fascism is perfect, absolute, unalterable. Only brains softened by puerile illusions, by sheer ignorance, can think differently, because they do not know what exactly is the Fascist Italy of 1935.<\/p>\n<p>For many months the wheel of destiny and of the impulse of our calm determination moves toward the goal. In these last hours the rhythm has increased and nothing can stop it now.<\/p>\n<p>It is not only an army marching towards its goal, but it is forty-four million Italians marching in unity behind this army. Because the blackest of injustices is being attempted against them, that of taking from them their place in the sun. When in 1915 Italy threw in her fate with that of the Allies, how many cries of admiration, how many promises were heard? But after the common victory, which cost Italy six hundred thousand dead, four hundred thousand lost, one million wounded, when peace was being discussed around the table only the crumbs of a rich colonial booty were left for us to pick up. For thirteen years we have been patient while the circle tightened around us at the hands of those who wish to suffocate us.<\/p>\n<p>We have been patient with Ethiopia for forty years. It is enough now.<\/p>\n<p>The League of Nations, instead of recognizing the rights of Italy, dares talk of sanctions, but until there is proof of the contrary, I refuse to believe that the authentic people of France will join in supporting sanctions against Italy. Six hundred thousand dead whose devotion was so heroic that the enemy commander justly admired them\u2014those fallen would now turn in their graves.<\/p>\n<p>And until there is proof to the contrary, I refuse to believe that the authentic people of Britain will want to spill blood and send Europe into a catastrophe for the sake of a barbarian country, unworthy of ranking among civilized nations. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to overlook the possible developments of tomorrow.<\/p>\n<p>To economic sanctions, we shall answer with our discipline, our spirit of sacrifice, our obedience. To military sanctions, we shall answer with military measures. To acts of war, we shall answer with acts of war.<\/p>\n<p>A people worthy of their past and their name cannot and never will take a different stand. Let me repeat, in the most categorical manner, that the sacred pledge which I make at this moment, before all the Italians gathered together today, is that I shall do everything in my power to prevent a colonial conflict from taking on the aspect and weight of a European war.<\/p>\n<p>This conflict may be attractive to certain minds which hope to avenge their disintegrated temples through this new catastrophe. Never, as at this historical hour, have the people of Italy revealed such force of character, and it is against this people to which mankind owes its greatest conquest, this people of heroes, of poets and saints, of navigators, of colonizers, that the world dares threaten sanctions.<\/p>\n<p>Italy! Italy!entirely and universally Fascist! The Italy of the blackshirt revolution, rise to your feet; let the cry of your determination rise to the skies and reach our soldiers in East Africa. Let it be a comfort to those who are about to fight. Let it be an encouragement to our friends and a warning to our enemies. It is the cry of Italy which goes beyond the mountains and the seas out into the great world. It is the cry of justice and of victory.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"c17\"><em><span class=\"c8 c4\">Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):<\/span><\/em><\/h3>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><span class=\"c10\"><a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:March_on_Rome.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960911000&amp;usg=AOvVaw35EqyhMNIzGl-t9gIx3uj2\">March on Rome<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Public Domain<\/span><span class=\"c10\"><br \/>\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Weimarer_Republik.png&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960912000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3tuA5PI3Yvh0i1_b4k2nao\">Weimar Electoral Results<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Pass3456<\/span><span class=\"c10\"><br \/>\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-00193,_Inflation,_Ein-Millionen-Markschein.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960913000&amp;usg=AOvVaw101vZXrOVgRTiXsmXduU9b\">Hyperinflation<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\">&#8211; Creative Commons License<\/span><span class=\"c10\"><br \/>\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1974-082-44,_Adolf_Hitler_im_Ersten_Weltkrieg_retouched.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960914000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2buJfveSTqeYr7FqVW70Wt\">Hitler in WWI<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Creative Commons License<\/span><span class=\"c10\"><br \/>\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-00344A,_M%25C3%25BCnchen,_nach_Hitler-Ludendorff_Prozess.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960914000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3C5f1AbvZvydEdP9xxaAf2\">Beer Hall Putsch<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Creative Commons License<\/span><span class=\"c10\"><br \/>\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_147-0510,_Berlin,_Lustgarten,_Kundgebung_der_HJ.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960915000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2rTSxCoeorU31DhdvRyMHb\">Hitler Youth and League of German Girls<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Creative Commons License<\/span><span class=\"c10\"><br \/>\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/Category:Francisco_Franco%23\/media\/File:CAUDILLO_FRANCISCO_FRANCO.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960916000&amp;usg=AOvVaw19AMl37HROgFrThwxHo_9o\">Franco<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\">&#8211; Creative Commons License<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/Final German territorial losses after World War One - Creative Commons License\"> Final German territorial losses after World War One<\/a> &#8211; Creative Commons License<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><em>For Further Reference:<\/em><\/h3>\n<p>&#8220;The Battle Over the Memory of the Spanish Civil War&#8221; by Alex W. Palmer, Photographs by Mat\u00edas Costa,\u00a0<em>Smithsonian Magazine, July 2018. <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/battle-memory-spanish-civil-war-180969338\/\">https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/battle-memory-spanish-civil-war-180969338\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Economic Depression and the Dictators: Crash Course European History #37<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/thecrashcourse.com\/courses\/economic-depression-and-dictators-crash-course-european-history-37\/\">https:\/\/thecrashcourse.com\/courses\/economic-depression-and-dictators-crash-course-european-history-37\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Rise and Fall of Fascism&#8221; at <em>The American Historical Association<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/about-aha-and-membership\/aha-history-and-archives\/gi-roundtable-series\/pamphlets\/em-18-what-is-the-future-of-italy-(1945)\/the-rise-and-fall-of-fascism\">https:\/\/www.historians.org\/about-aha-and-membership\/aha-history-and-archives\/gi-roundtable-series\/pamphlets\/em-18-what-is-the-future-of-italy-(1945)\/the-rise-and-fall-of-fascism<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Nation and Race&#8221; Volume One, Chapter Eleven, excerpt from <em>Mein Kampf, <a href=\"https:\/\/history.hanover.edu\/courses\/excerpts\/165hitler.html\">https:\/\/history.hanover.edu\/courses\/excerpts\/165hitler.html<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Mussolini&#8217;s Speech-Broadcast October 2, 1935&#8221; from History Central, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.historycentral.com\/HistoricalDocuments\/Mussolini'sSpeech.html\">https:\/\/www.historycentral.com\/HistoricalDocuments\/Mussolini&#8217;sSpeech.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox shaded\">\n<p>This chapter contains a remix of text from the following:<\/p>\n<p>The main text is taken from Christopher Brooks, &#8220;Chapter 9: Fascism&#8221; in\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.nscc.ca\/worldhistory\" rel=\"cc:attributionURL\">Western Civilization: A Concise History<\/a> <\/em>Volume 3, licensed under a <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Original material in the text boxes, an introductory paragraph, and &#8220;For Further References&#8221; sections by Nicole V. Jobin, licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-width: 0\" src=\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/80x15.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Original material in section 16.5 &#8220;The Nazis,&#8221; the inclusion of a &#8220;Working with Evidence&#8221; section and the inclusion of references in the &#8220;For Further Reference&#8221; section by Meghan K. Bowe, licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2328,"menu_order":16,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-134","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":285,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2328"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":716,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/134\/revisions\/716"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/285"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/134\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}