Fascism

The failed putsch left Hitler doubly resolute but newly cautious; he decided to pursue power through what he called a “policy of legality.” This approach didn’t rule out the use of violence, but it did demand something more: a nationwide political organization. The Nazis set to work broadening their base. By 1929 they had daily and weekly newspapers and special clubs for young people, women, teachers, lawyers, and doctors. To whip up enthusiasm, Hitler continued to decry the government’s payment of war reparations, an act that was, to his mind, a craven admission of national guilt. He denounced the British and French for plotting to keep Germany poor and weak. He lambasted mainstream politicians for ignoring the needs of the common people. Above all, he heaped scorn on the Communists, a strategy that won him friends in the financial community and favorable coverage in some of the nation’s largest media outlets.

Still, as the twenties stumbled to their tumultuous end, the Nazis remained a minor party and at the mercy of events. For them, good news was bad news. The economy had begun to perk up. Inflation was tamed. Hitler’s countrymen were feeling better about the future and therefore less interested in the supposed cure-all he had to sell.

Then, suddenly, the Great Depression blocked the road to recovery and Germany went into a tailspin. With excess capital earmarked for war reparations, the nation’s investments had been financed entirely by borrowing. Now debts had to be repaid and credit was no longer available. Global markets shrank, squeezing the demand for exports. Production declined, unemployment quadrupled, and businesses shut their doors while pawnshops opened theirs. Leaders of the traditional political parties did little but squabble, creating a deadlock in the Reichstag, followed by a series of elections that settled nothing. An angry man for an angry age, the future Führer had found his audience at last. With Deutschland once more on its knees, he offered himself as a bullhorn for its misery. He lashed out again at the November criminals and argued that the time had come for a new generation of fearless Germans led by a party that would fulfill the fatherland’s destiny, lift the people up, and crush their foes.

In September 1930, unhappy voters marched to the polls with protest on their minds. The Nazi tally went up, and the party’s position in the Reichstag improved as Hitler scored impressive gains among women, small businesspeople, peasants, and the young. Overnight, what had been the ninth-largest party became the second, trailing only the Social Democrats. Communists, too, did well as the political extremes assaulted the bastions of democracy from both sides, shrinking the center to an island whose sole inhabitants were pious aristocrats and bewildered liberals.

Tall, dignified Paul von Hindenburg, the German president, was a revered former war hero, but his face was hardly a fresh one. The old general had first fought for his nation in 1866, in a long-forgotten war against Austria. In his prime, he had represented the epitome of the Prussian officer class, devoted to Kaiser and flag, with no higher calling than duty and no greater fear than change. As a political figure in the modern age, he seemed a time traveler, without relevant skills and unable to decipher the meaning of contemporary events. The aged president was not well served by the officials around him, who clung to their ambitions like life jackets, trying to outmaneuver one another for prime seats on a sinking boat.

Two years on, in the spring of 1932, the old man was persuaded to stand for reelection. He defeated Hitler, but with the Depression still holding the country back, the Nazi vote rose again in the July balloting for parliament, enabling the party to capture one hundred more Reichstag seats than any of its opponents. A shaken Hindenburg invited Hitler to join a coalition government, but the upstart demanded full executive power, a proposal that the president bravely refused. This led to yet another round of elections. In November, the Nazi momentum slowed, but the party still won enough seats to provide leverage. Because bringing the Communists into a coalition was out of the question, Hindenburg was seemingly left with a choice between accepting Hitler as leader or continuing to hold elections with little hope of a decisive outcome. His advisers were split about what to do, but his son, Oskar, a Nazi sympathizer and also corrupt, argued on behalf of the intemperate Austrian. On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg folded his hand. Like Mussolini a decade earlier, Hitler was given the keys to power by an elderly man who felt he had no better option—and, like Il Duce, he arrived in the nation’s highest office without ever having won a majority vote, yet by constitutional means. The new German chancellor called the historic transfer “a legal revolution.”

THE COUNTRY’S POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT—BIG BUSINESS, THE military, and the Church—had initially dismissed the Nazis as a band of loudmouthed hooligans who would never attract wide support. Over time, they saw value in the party as a bulwark against Communism, but nothing more. As for Hitler, they were not nearly so scared of him as they should have been. They underestimated the man because of his lack of schooling and were taken in by his attempts at charm. He smiled when he needed to and took care to answer their questions with reassuring lies. He was, to members of the old guard, clearly an amateur who was in over his head and unlikely to remain popular for long. Though they misread Hitler, the young chancellor was an acute judge of them. “The reactionary forces believe they have me on the lead,” he confided to a colleague in February 1933. “I know they hope I will achieve my own ruin by mismanagement … Our great opportunity lies in acting before they do. We have no scruples, no bourgeois hesitations … They regard me as an uneducated barbarian. Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians. It is an honorable title.”

Empowered by the Enabling Law, Hitler launched a political blitzkrieg, destroying what remained of German democracy. He began by abolishing local assemblies and replacing provincial governors with Nazis. He sent SA thugs to brutalize political opponents and, when necessary, cart them off to newly opened concentration camps. He disposed of the unions by declaring May 1, 1933, a paid national holiday, then occupying union offices throughout the country on May 2. He purged the civil service of disloyal elements and issued a decree banning Jews from the professions. He placed theater, music, and radio productions under the control of Joseph Goebbels and barred unsympathetic journalists from doing their jobs. To ensure order, he consolidated political, intelligence, and police functions in a new organization, the Gestapo.

The Nazi revolution moved ahead with quicksilver speed, but for some party members it was not ploughing deeply enough. Hundreds of thousands had signed on to the party with the expectation of immediate rewards. In the cities, they wanted jobs; in the countryside, land. The oversize SA, the Sturmabteilung, hungered to replace the regular army. Hitler, however, was not the servant of his followers. His goal was to rebuild the foundations of German national power and, to do that, he would need the skills and experience of people outside the party. He had no intention of dismantling big agricultural enterprises, disrupting core industries, or picking a fight with the military. Instead he used the personal diplomacy he was capable of, and the fear he had engendered, to enforce discipline within the party. Generally, that effort went well—but there was one notable exception.

The Nazis had recruited the SA to provide the clenched fist they needed to knock aside obstacles along the path to power. Now that the finish line had been crossed, the force was without a mission, and party leaders made plans to trim it. Rather than acquiesce, the militia’s chief of staff, Ernst Röhm, rebelled, arguing that there were many more tempting targets to attack, including corporations, landed estates, and anyone with property the SA could plunder. From Röhm’s perspective, a revolutionary movement needed a revolutionary army, and a revolutionary army devoured everything in its way. Hitler tried to reason with his old friend, but Röhm was intransigent, even adding firepower to units assigned to the capital—a threatening gesture.

On June 4, 1934, Hitler and Röhm met again. The chancellor, at his most ingratiating, proposed a cooling-off period in which the SA would go on leave for a month, with any final decisions about its fate put off until its return to duty. Röhm—who really should have known better—saluted and dropped his guard. On June 30, the Gestapo arrested him and rounded up several hundred alleged co-conspirators. Given a revolver with a single bullet and allowed ten minutes to commit suicide, Röhm replied defiantly, “If I am to be killed let Adolf do it himself.” When the ten minutes were up, two of Hitler’s aides shot Röhm, who reportedly died gasping, “Mein Führer, mein Führer.”

Operation Hummingbird, known also as “the Night of the Long Knives,” eliminated the SA as a threat to the regular army. This secured Hitler’s ties to the military establishment and cleared the way for him to succeed Hindenburg when the aged president died shortly afterward. Hitler emerged from the crisis as head of government, head of state, and commander in chief of the armed forces. From then on, the army was required to swear allegiance not to the country or the constitution, but to the Führer personally.

HITLER’S CLAIM TO DISTINCTION RESTED NOT ON THE QUALITY OF his ideas, but instead on his extraordinary drive to turn warped concepts into reality. Where others hesitated or were constrained by moral scruples, he preferred to act and saw emotional hardness as essential. From early in his career, he was a genius at reading a crowd and modulating his message accordingly. In conversations with advisers, he was frank about this. He said that most people earnestly desired to have faith in something and were not intellectually equipped to quibble over what that object of belief might be. He thought it shrewd, therefore, to reduce issues to terms that were easy to grasp and to lure his audiences into thinking that behind the many sources of their problems there loomed a single adversary. “There are…only two possibilities,” he explained, “either the victory of the Aryan side or its annihilation and the victory of the Jews.”

Hitler felt that his countrymen were looking for a man who spoke to their anger, understood their fears, and sought their participation in a stirring and righteous cause. He was delighted, not dismayed, by the outrage his speeches generated abroad. He believed that his followers wanted to see him challenged, because they yearned to hear him express contempt for those who thought they could silence him. The image of a brave man standing up against powerful foes is immensely appealing. In this way, Hitler could make even his persecution of the defenseless seem like self-defense.

The chancellor’s average height, dark hair, and unathletic body—so at odds with the Aryan ideal—may have added to his support. He referred to himself as a true representative of the people, a workingman, a veteran, without a bank account, investment income, or a mansion. “Workers,” he declared, “you must look upon me as your guarantor. I was born a son of the people; I have spent all my life struggling for you.”

Citizens of the Reich were fed a steady diet of propaganda at the workplace, in public rallies, and over the rapidly evolving medium of radio. The Führer was the first dictator with the ability to reach eighty million people in a single instant with a unifying summons. Radio was the Internet of the 1930s, but, being a one-way means of communication, it was easier to control. Never had such an efficient tool for manipulating the human mind been available. For a time, Hitler’s major speeches were global events. In schools, meanwhile, Mein Kampf was a sacred text. “We studied it as a Bible. Hatred was our creed,” recalled one student.

Pundits talk today about the importance of authenticity in politics. Hitler lied shamelessly about himself and about his enemies. He convinced millions of men and women that he cared for them deeply when, in fact, he would have willingly sacrificed them all. His murderous ambition, avowed racism, and utter immorality were given the thinnest mask, and yet millions of Germans were drawn to Hitler precisely because he seemed authentic. They screamed, “Sieg Heil” with happiness in their hearts, because they thought they were creating a better world.

They were not the only ones deceived. Writing in 1935, Winston Churchill observed:

Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism. Nor is this impression merely the dazzle of power. He exerted it on his companions at every stage in his struggle, even when his fortunes were in the lowest depths. One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I should hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the Nations.

Hitler was smart enough not to try to reinvent the economy. In his first two years, the gloom of the Depression started to lift and unemployment was cut in half. The boom created three million new jobs, with the armaments industry leading the way. The timing was critical, because Germany’s military might had shriveled. The country had virtually no air force or navy, and its army lacked modern equipment. What it did have was a leader who fully grasped the need to prepare for war because he was bent on initiating just such a conflict. While the British and the French were hesitant to spend money in anticipation of a clash they hoped to avoid, Germany plunged into a massive campaign of semi-clandestine rearmament. For years Hitler insisted that his intentions were peaceful and that he was just trying to compensate for the unfair treatment Germany had received. When he took a step forward, such as in remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936, he insisted that he planned to go no further, that this limited action satisfied Germany’s demand for justice. But there was always a next step.

Hitler was not going to stop. He urged his followers to awaken so that they might “grow the German Reich of which great poets have dreamed.” He had read enough philosophy to appreciate the concept of world historical figures, agents of destiny, supermen, who could transform an entire age through the majestic power of their will. He knew to the root of his being that he was such a figure, and, in all Europe, he saw but one other.

FOUR

“CLOSE YOUR HEARTS TO PITY”

IN 1940, CHARLIE CHAPLIN RELEASED THE GREAT DICTATOR, HIS first talking movie. In the film, the incomparable actor performed the dual roles of a Jewish barber and the self-aggrandizing Adenoid Hynkel, tyrant of a fictional country in the center of Europe. Born just four days apart, Chaplin and Hitler were two of the world’s most famous men, similar also in height, build, and mustache.fn1 During the movie, Benzino Napaloni, a neighboring dictator, comes to visit Hynkel and the two exchange views on their plans for war. The clownish duo sit in a barbershop, side by side, each feverishly adjusting the height of his chair so that he might look down on the other.

Hitler and Mussolini met more than a dozen times. Each had a lofty vision of his personal destiny and each harbored an unquenchable rage toward a world that, when he was young, had failed to recognize his talents. Both resented their more educated and socially correct contemporaries and both were Fascists, though only Hitler was a Nazi. During his political ascent, Hitler considered the older man to be a trailblazer worthy of emulation. Il Duce paid little heed to Hitler at first, then, when he came to know him, thought him a potentially useful maniac.

Mussolini rejected Hitler’s racial theories, which he privately called “stupid, barbarous, and unworthy of a European nation.” As an Italian, he had no cause to rhapsodize about the myth of a master Nordic race. He had also, early in his career, been recognized by Jewish newspaper publishers as one of the world’s leading Christian defenders of their people.

Memories of the twentieth century would be far different had Italy chosen to align itself with France and Great Britain in the Second World War, as it had in the First. Sadly, Mussolini had resentments left over from the earlier alliance and felt that British and French officials looked down on him as one might on an uncouth third cousin. The decisive break came in 1935 when the League of Nations slapped economic sanctions on Italy for invading Ethiopia. Mussolini deemed it hypocritical for Europe’s leading imperial powers to punish his homeland for wanting an empire of its own.

Mussolini caught Hitler’s fancy because they both favored the same machismo-laden rhetoric of daring, nationalism, anti-Communism, and war. In Mein Kampf, the German lauded “the great man south of the Alps, who, full of ardent love for his people, made no pacts with the enemies of Italy.” Many of the tactics Hitler employed to seize and consolidate power, Mussolini had adopted previously: the reliance on violent gangs, the intimidation of parliament, the strengthening and subsequent abuse of authority, the subjugation of the civil service, the affinity for spectacle, and the insistence that the leader, whether Der Führer or Il Duce, could do no wrong.

Hitler and Mussolini had moments of genuine collegiality, and the former’s appreciation for the Italian dictator’s early triumphs never waned. But Chaplin’s comic satire had a real-life mirror. The two leaders and the countries they represented were an imperfect fit. A diplomatic troll might have scripted the chancellor’s first Italian visit, to Venice in June 1934. Problems began at the airport, where Hitler exited his plane wearing a drab khaki raincoat, only to be welcomed by Mussolini in full military dress. At their meeting, Mussolini tried to get by without an interpreter and so failed to understand much of what Hitler said. The next morning, Mussolini showed up for a parade thirty minutes late, then made a speech in Piazza San Marco that barely acknowledged Hitler’s presence. At lunch, a mischievous chef added salt to the Führer’s coffee. The German leader chose an afternoon boat tour to discuss the racial inferiority of Mediterranean peoples. Halfway through that evening’s reception, Mussolini walked out, and later, in a calculated leak to reporters, he compared his guest to Genghis Khan. Hitler thought of Victor, the Italian monarch, as “King Nutcracker.”

Over time, the personal dynamics improved, but not by much. Hitler became frustrated with Italy as an ally, and Mussolini was exasperated that, when conducting business, his German counterpart rattled off statistics like machine-gun fire and never seemed to shut up. Il Duce’s son-in-law noted at the time, “Hitler talks, talks, talks. Mussolini suffers—he, who is in the habit of talking himself, and who instead has to remain silent.” After one encounter, the two had to fly to Berlin in the Führer’s plane. As soon as they were aloft, Mussolini took his revenge by insisting—to Hitler’s white-knuckled terror—on piloting the aircraft.

The ugliness in Italian Fascism was displayed most graphically before the party took power, when its armed squads killed an estimated two thousand leftist rivals, and in Ethiopia, where Rome’s designated occupiers ran viciously and without a leash. In office, however, Mussolini did not feel called to conduct domestic purges of the type orchestrated by Hitler, and for all his tough words, he could still be shocked. In 1934, when Hitler ordered the murder of a hundred of his own supporters, Mussolini was astonished by his cruelty to onetime friends. A short time later, a Nazi assassination squad in Vienna shot the Austrian chancellor in the throat and sat around for three hours while he bled to death on a sofa. At the time, the chancellor’s wife and two young children were guests of Il Duce’s, staying at a villa close to his along the Adriatic coast. Mussolini went to the villa and, in halting German, personally conveyed to the widow the sad news of her husband’s homicide.

MUSSOLINI’S EGO LIFTED HIM TO THE PINNACLE OF POWER, THEN betrayed him. The man had such faith in his instincts, and believed so fully in what he heard himself say, that he failed to either seek or to take sound advice. For much of his tenure, he occupied Italy’s principal cabinet positions himself, as many as six simultaneously. Unlike Hitler, who left the bulk of hard work to others, Mussolini took pride in the art of government. He just wasn’t that good at it.

His most telling failure was in preparing Italy for what was to come. Nothing made him more eager than the expectation that his country would prove itself in conflict. “War is to a man what motherhood is to a woman,” he liked to say. Raising his fists for emphasis, he implored his countrymen to do what worthy Romans did: hate their enemies, steel themselves for battle, and offer their lives for the nation.

Playing Caesar, he regarded the conquest of Ethiopia as an auspicious start; and in March 1938, he ordered his air force to strike Barcelona on behalf of General Francisco Franco and the right-wing military in Spain’s Civil War. For two terror-filled days, liquid-air bombs pelted the city’s undefended streets, exploding trolleys and buses, flattening apartment buildings, breaking windows, and leaving rescue workers to scoop into baskets the human fragments they found on blood-spattered streets. Mussolini exulted that the time had come for Italians to “horrify the world by their aggressiveness … instead of charming it with their guitars.” He also hoped to impress the Germans who he said “love total, pitiless war.” If his goal was to generate horror, he succeeded. The pope demanded that the bombing stop. When the death toll climbed above thirteen hundred, so did Franco. So, even, did Hitler.

Beating up on soft targets was one thing, but after a decade and a half of Fascist rule, Italy was in no shape to fight a modern war against a capable foe. It didn’t have an adequate supply of men, planes, ships, guns, or even uniforms. Unlike Germany and Czechoslovakia, Italy had never invested in a serious domestic armaments industry. Mussolini had promised his people economic self-sufficiency, but his country remained dependent on imported coal and fertilizer and lacked the seaborne military clout to safeguard its ships and ports. The Ministry of War Production estimated that Italy might be ready for combat—in 1949. Mussolini knew all this but preferred his own truth. He was so quick to boast about the number of available army divisions that he cut in half the size of each, then forgot he had done so. Despite a 20 percent increase in population, the country was to mobilize fewer troops in World War II than it had in World War I.

In 1939, when Germany and Italy signed a mutual defense treaty, Mussolini urged Hitler to delay starting a conflict for several years. The Führer had no such intention. On August 22, he urged his senior officers to “close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure … I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth.”

Early on September 1, fifty-six German divisions, supported by fifteen hundred aircraft, swarmed into western Poland, leaving the eastern half to be devoured by the Soviet Union. The Wehrmacht followed up in the winter and spring of 1940 by invading Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Hitler invited Mussolini to join in taking the next step, the invasion of France. Il Duce hesitated. Only after the Nazis had made a sieve out of the Maginot Line and were about to enter Paris did Mussolini declare war. Typically, he made the decision without consulting his military staff—a costly mistake. His country had a large merchant fleet at sea, one-third of which was forced by the British to surrender with Italy barely firing a shot.