8.6 Fascism and Totalitarianism

Fascism's roots reached back before 1914, to aggressive nationalism, anti-Semitism and the cult of struggle (7.2, 7.5), but it grew powerful in the bitterness, fear of communism, weak new democracies and economic instability that followed the war.

• The nation above the individual: people existed to serve the national community.
• One leader: Mussolini's title was Il Duce and Hitler's was der Führer, both meaning “the leader.”
• War and struggle: violence was celebrated as healthy and renewing.
• Anti-democracy and anti-communism: parliaments were weak and divisive, and Marxism was the great enemy.
• Mass mobilization: rallies, uniforms, youth groups, monumental architecture, radio broadcasts and films created loyalty; Leni Riefenstahl's film of a Nazi rally, Triumph of the Will (1935), is a famous example.
• Private property kept, but businesses and unions were to serve state goals. In Nazi Germany, racial ideology and anti-Semitism were at the center.

Italy had won World War I but gained less territory than promised, and from 1919 to 1920 strikes and factory occupations frightened property owners. Benito Mussolini's Fascist squads, the Blackshirts, attacked socialists and unions. In October 1922, as Fascists threatened a March on Rome, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini prime minister rather than use the army against them. After the murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, Mussolini moved to full dictatorship, banning other parties and controlling the press. He organized the economy into a corporate state, made peace with the Catholic Church in the Lateran Accords (1929), and invaded Ethiopia in 1935.

Adolf Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch (1923) led to a short prison term, where he wrote Mein Kampf. The Nazis then sought power legally, and the Depression gave them their chance (8.5). Conservative politicians persuaded President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933, believing they could control him.

Hitler moved fast. After the Reichstag fire (February 1933), an emergency decree suspended civil liberties. The Enabling Act (March 1933) let Hitler make laws without the Reichstag. Other parties and independent unions were abolished, and in the Night of the Long Knives (1934) Hitler had the leaders of the Nazi paramilitary SA and other rivals murdered. When Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler combined the offices of president and chancellor. The Gestapo and SS enforced obedience, Joseph Goebbels ran propaganda, and the Hitler Youth trained children. Persecution of Jews began immediately (8.9). Authoritarian rule spread elsewhere too: after failed attempts at democracy, Józef Piłsudski seized power in Poland (1926), Admiral Miklós Horthy ruled Hungary as regent from 1920, and King Carol II set up a royal dictatorship in Romania (1938).

In 1936 a Popular Front government of republicans, socialists and others won elections in Spain's Second Republic. In July, army officers rebelled, and General Francisco Franco soon took command. The revolt started a civil war between the Nationalists (army, Church, monarchists, landowners and the fascist Falange) and the Republicans (liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists and Basque and Catalan regionalists). Germany and Italy sent troops, planes and weapons to Franco; German bombers destroyed the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, an attack Picasso protested in a famous painting. The Soviet Union aided the Republic, and volunteers from many countries fought in the International Brigades. Britain and France followed a policy of non-intervention. Franco won in 1939 and ruled Spain until his death in 1975.

Joseph Stalin ended the NEP in 1928 and launched Five-Year Plans to turn the Soviet Union into an industrial power in a decade. Huge steel mills, dams and new cities were built, and output of coal, steel and electricity rose dramatically, at the price of harsh labor discipline and shortages of consumer goods.

To pay for industry and control the countryside, Stalin forced peasants into collective farms from 1929. Better-off peasants labeled kulaks were deported or killed, and many peasants slaughtered their animals rather than give them up. Grain seizures caused a catastrophic famine in 1932–1933 that killed millions, especially in Ukraine, where it is called the Holodomor; Ukraine and many other countries recognize it as a genocide, and historians continue to debate the intent behind it. In the Great Purge or Great Terror (1936–1938), show trials of old Bolshevik leaders, purges of the army, and mass arrests led to roughly 700,000 executions, while millions passed through the gulag, a network of forced labor camps. A cult of personality presented Stalin as an all-knowing leader.