Revolution and expansion

The German ruling elites were not the last people to misjudge Hitler and his ideology. Many foreigners saw Nazism as just a more vulgar and brutal form of Prussian militarism. The National Socialists, with their goose-stepping para­military units, ubiquitous swastika banners and ‘Heil Hitler' salutes, had much in common with other mass movements of the Left and Right.

Mein Kampf (German: My Struggle)

A semi-autobiographical book dictated by Adolf Hitler to his chauffeur and his personal secretary, Rudolf Hess, while he was serving a prison sentence for his part in the failed Munich beer hall putsch of 9 November 1923. It was published in 1925—26 in two volumes. Sales did not reach the hundreds of thousands until Hitler took power in 1933. It is a myth that the book was unread or ignored by foreign statesmen. It contained no detailed timetable for aggression; instead, Mein Kampf is a rambling exploration of Hitler's basic political and racial views.

League of Nations

An international organization established in 1919 by the peace treaties that ended the First World War. Its purpose was to promote international peace through collective security and to organize conferences on economic and disarmament issues. It was formally dissolved in 1946.

social Darwinism

A nineteenth-century theory, inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which argued that the history of human society should be seen as ‘the survival of the fittest'.

anti-Semitism

A word which appeared in Europe around 1860. With it, the attack on Jews was based no longer on grounds of creed but on those of race. Its manifestations include pogroms in nineteenth­century Eastern Europe and the systematic murder of an estimated six million Jews by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945.

political parties were disbanded. Labour unions, the professions, churches and other public associations were ‘co-ordinated’ with Nazi practices. A parallel party structure was set up alongside that of the state, and, after Hindenburg’s death on 2 August 1934, Hitler assumed the offices of both chancellor and president. Outside observers disapproved of Nazi criminality, but for diplomatic officials the real question was Hitler’s foreign policy. From his campaign speeches and his book, Mein Kampf, there was no question that the new German chancellor would pursue revisionism with at least as much determination as his predecessors.

Hitler had something much more radical in mind. Before Germany was armed, though, he was careful not to provoke the European Powers. When he took Germany out of the League of Nations and disarmament talks in October 1933, he did so while proclaiming his love of peace. To maintain the pretence of policy continuity, he retained until 1938 the foreign and defence ministers appointed by President Hindenburg. Yet he despised the traditional ruling elites and their obsession with shifting frontiers and perpetual diplomacy. As a leader attuned to the new age of mass politics, he was determined to obliterate the old order. Even so, when Hitler assumed office, there was little in his past to suggest that he had the experience or talent to last one year as chancellor. After leaving school in 1907, this resentful son of a minor official employed by the Habsburg civil service eked out a dismal living as a landscape artist in Vienna.

Sadly, Hitler’s career did not end in obscurity. Instead, a decade later, he began to convert his vision into reality. Two concepts were fundamental to his world­view. One was race, the other space. Human history, according to Hitler, was a struggle between races. Superior races either flourished or perished. To grow, they had to preserve their biological purity and conquer ever more living space (Lebensraum). Destiny had ordained him as the saviour of the Germanic race from the folly of its aristocratic leaders. He intended to erase the disastrous 1919 settlement and to wage pitiless war against the most dangerous racial enemy, the Jews. In the eyes of Nazis, the Jews were a parasitic race that plotted to enslave some races with Bolshevism, such as the Slavs, and to destroy others, especially the Germanic (or Aryan) master race. Racism was commonplace in this era of European imperialism, but Nazism constituted a distinctly dogmatic and murderous form of state racism. Hitler did not distinguish between internal and external racial policy. To expand abroad, Germany needed a pure and vigorous racial core at home. The possibility of another ‘stab in the back’ (see Chapter 2) by internal enemies had to be removed. Race laws to isolate Jews, Gypsies and other ‘alien’ peoples were brutally enforced, while social measures were introduced to promote the birth rate of ‘healthy’ Germans and to sterilize, abort and later murder those who were deemed to be racially inferior or defective.

Germany’s initial military weakness dictated that Hitler’s programme had to unfold in roughly defined stages. The first stage was Germany’s return as a Great Power through large-scale rearmament and territorial expansion in Central and Eastern Europe. Stage two was the conquest of European Russia and the con­solidation and ruthless economic exploitation of Lebensraum in the east. The final stage — one that Hitler was unsure he would live to see — would be the final battle for global supremacy against the United States. Achieving this long-term goal called for arms, autarky and allies. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had criticized the leaders of imperial Germany for gratuitously provoking Britain before 1914 with a naval armaments race. To secure a free hand on the European continent, Hitler hoped to strike a bargain on naval strength and spheres of influence with the British, and form a close alliance with Italy, thereby isolating Germany’s arch-enemy, France. The precondition to world domination was, of course, military supremacy. As Hitler well knew, the First World War had taught military theorists everywhere that war preparations did not entail simply the buildup of large standing forces to fight the first battles (arms in breadth), but also the acquisition of huge arms industries and self-sufficiency in raw materials such as oil, rubber and iron ore to feed the voracious appetite of protracted modern war (arms in depth). From the very start of his chancellorship, Hitler aimed to build arms in depth by turning over the whole German economy to military preparations. At first, the Depression provided enough slack in the German economy to gain a swift head-start on rearmament, but when the scale of rearmament began to strain Germany’s finances, Hitler rebuffed calls from the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, to slow the pace and return Germany to the world economy through trade.

autarky

A policy that aims at achieving national economic self­sufficiency. It is commonly associated with the economic programmes espoused by Germany, Italy and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s.

total war

A war that uses all resources at a state's disposal including the complete mobilization of both the economy and society.

Relentless German aggression was one of the principal causes of the Second World War. Yet Hitler was not alone in his wish to overturn the status quo. Benito Mussolini dreamed of revolution too. The once-committed socialist broke with the Italian Left over its objection to Italy’s entry into the European war in 1915. He fought, was wounded and then returned to civilian life as editor of a right­wing newspaper agitating for Italy to be rewarded for its part in the Allied victory. By 1921, he emerged as leader (Duce) of the Italian Fascist movement. A year later, in the midst of near civil war, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini prime minister. Although these events were later mythologized as the ‘March on Rome’, Mussolini’s premiership was in fact the product of an alliance

see Chapter 2

Spanish Civil War

Began on 18 July 1936 as an attempted right-wing military coup led by General Francisco Franco. The coup was launched with elite troops from Spanish Morocco to topple the recently elected socialist and anti-clerical Popular Front government. Franco's Nationalists failed to take Madrid, and the Republican government of President Azana remained in control of much of Spain. Both sides appealed for outside help to achieve victory. As a result, Spain became Europe's ideological battlefield.

between Italy's new radical Right and traditional conservatism against the bogey of communism. In the 1920s, while he built up the power and prestige of his regime internally, Mussolini played the responsible statesman in Europe, a posture which also stemmed from Italian weakness as well as the limited scope for mischief-making in the era of Locarno.

In the mid-1950s, Mussolini appeared to change course. In 1935, Italy embarked on a colonial war in Africa and a year later large-scale intervention in the Spanish Civil War. This opportunistic turnabout — not to mention Italy's dismal wartime performance — has led some to dismiss Fascism as an empty propaganda trick and Mussolini as the archetypal papier-mache Mephistophelean. However, the Fascist Duce was as ruthless and determined as the Nazi Führer. Nazism and Fascism were both propelled by a distinctive revolutionary dynamic: Hitler planned to realize his race revolution through war and conquest; Mussolini also valued foreign expansion as the means to Italy's total ‘fascistization'. The policies of the two regimes were shaped by similar national experiences. As recently unified states, Italy and Germany behaved like restless ‘latecomers' in this era of intense Great Power rivalry and overseas imperialism. Their national aspirations had been frustrated at the Paris Peace Conference. As mass movements arising in times of social unrest, economic dislocation and political deadlock, both dictatorships claimed to be the only legitimate ‘democratic' expressions of the national will.

Yet there were differences. The racism and anti-Semitism, so fundamental to Nazism, were more peripheral to Fascism (many Italians saw the Duce's race laws of 1938 as a distasteful northern import). Both regimes had been formed with the connivance of the conservative ruling elites, but Mussolini was never able to shake them off and attain the iron grip that Hitler had on the German state and its people. Italy's monarchy, the Catholic Church and the armed forces were centres of authority and power that the Duce could not ignore. Another difference lay in their ultimate goals: Hitler dreamed of total wars of racial expansion culminating in Germany's mastery of the globe; Mussolini intended to found a new Roman Empire by seizing the Mediterranean and its ocean outlets as Italy's rightful spazio vitale. ‘Either war,' he said, ‘or let's end this commedia of [claiming to be] a Great Power.' The obstacles to a Fascist empire were the two leading status quo Powers, Britain and France. Germany, their most formidable potential foe, was Mussolini's most important potential ally. Contacts between the Nazis and Rome stretched back to the Munich putsch, but Mussolini (at first anyway) and many of his advisers (long after) were wary. Undoubtedly, a resurgent Germany would create scope for a more aggressive policy, but the new Reich might also absorb Austria — one of the buffers between the two states and a focus for Italian influence in south-east Europe — and, worse, begin to demand from Italy territory taken from Austria (South Tyrol).

Italian policy reflected this uncertainty. In 1932—33, the Fascist regime proposed a new Four-Power Treaty between the Locarno Powers to arbitrate European affairs. London and Paris humoured what they saw as an Italian conceit. Apart from sidelining the League of Nations, the aim behind this demarche was to contain Germany for a time in a manner beneficial to Italian ambitions. Hitler, who had no interest in multilateral security systems, signed the treaty and then ignored it. On 24 July 1934, the Austrian Nazis attempted a coup and murdered the quasi-fascist chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. Italian troops mobilized to deter an Anschluss. Hitler, who denied foreknowledge of the coup, disavowed the Austrian Nazis. Italo-German relations cooled, but not for long. The two dictators were on converging ideological paths. The outbreak of the Abyssinian War on 3 October 1935 marked the junction point. Under the impression that he had been given a green light in April by the Western Powers for a war in Africa as a reward for Italy's condemnation of German unilateral rearmament, Mussolini was incensed by the opposition of France and Britain and the imposition of limited League of Nations economic sanctions against Italy. The Führer, who exploited the Abyssinian conflict to remilitarize the Rhineland on 7 March 1936, offered the Italians benevolent neutrality and some material support. The war ended in May 1936. Mussolini's defiance of the Western Powers and the League had impressed Hitler. In January 1936, the Duce signalled his intentions by dropping objections to Austria becoming a German satellite.

In November 1936, Mussolini announced the Rome-Berlin Axis. It was followed a year later by Italy's accession to the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact. Long after the Axis was announced, British and French statesmen sought to woo Mussolini away from Hitler. The ideological bond could not be broken. Officials in Paris and London pointed to Italian support for General Franco's rebellion in Spain as the stumbling-block. The reality was that the Duce revelled in the ‘dynamism' of his wars. Ironically, the Abyssinian and Spanish adventures drained Italy of its war-making potential. The Italian defence budget trebled, but the money was spent on current operations and wasteful projects such as main­taining large numbers of ill-equipped infantry instead of the in-depth preparations essential for modern warfare. In some ways, the emphasis on quantity over quality and staying power accorded well with Fascist bluster and bullying. After all, Italy was treated as a player because it possessed a big navy, a large bomber force and an army of ‘eight million bayonets'. However, the Italian peninsula was vulnerable to Anglo-French naval blockade and bombardment. In a European war, Rome would have to rely on its preponderant northern ally for coal to fuel Italian war industries and for military aid. Mussolini's resolve to strike a blow against the status quo thus destined Italy to fall under the shadow of the Third Reich. This was a fate he embraced. As his son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Ciano, put it, the Axis was ‘based above all upon the identity of political regimes, which determines a common destiny'.