Fascism. David Renton

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СКАЧАТЬ to say that fascism succeeded in establishing an empire without noting that the empire was used to carry out the Holocaust, or to say that it achieved a dominance of visual spectacles over politics without asking how those spectacles contributed to the stabilisation of a murderous regime, is not to explain fascism. Rather, it is to choose a form of blindness in which historians are incapable of seeing fascism except from a single perspective. Those who adopt the New Consensus remain trapped forever looking at the past only through the eyes of the intellectuals who shilled for fascism. Their approach prevents them from ever seeing fascism through the eyes of its victims.

       Opposition and Resistance

      The question of how the fascist regime might be defeated was a central concern of the interwar Marxists. Several recent historians, including Omar Bartov and Alf Lüdtke, have argued that in power the Nazi state achieved an extraordinary degree of popular support. Evidence for this view can be found in the letters of junior soldiers, which reveal that they supported the war far more keenly than their counterparts in Italy. It is also true that signs of support were everywhere, in the uniforms and new habits that the Nazis introduced, in the adoring faces at large rallies and in the popularity of Nazi badges and official collections.⁹⁹ However, it is not the case that all Germans supported the regime. Some Germans fully accepted the regime, others were more indifferent. A minority actively opposed the Nazis.

      The best chance for open resistance to the Hitler regime came in the months before Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship, in January 1933. Once Hitler was in power, the chance had been lost. This observation can be confirmed by the remarkable account of Daniel Guérin, a French revolutionary socialist who travelled to Germany in August and September 1932. As a prominent trade unionist and anti-fascist writer, he was given access to the world of social democracy, its supporters and their official meeting-places. He returned in April 1933, hiding the records of his journey in the frame of his bicycle. Guérin found that German Social Democracy had been destroyed, as well as Communist Red Berlin. He described a world in which young unemployed Communists had been won over to the ‘National Bolshevism’ of the NSDAP, while the trade union headquarters were hung with swastikas. Middle-class socialists had capitulated to the regime, if they could, and the convinced opponents of the regime were mostly in jail or dead. By April 1933, the Nazis had appropriated even the songs and the flags of the defeated Socialists, and, in Daniel Guérin’s judgement, ‘the workers’ movement resemble[d] in no way what it was a few months ago’.¹⁰⁰

      The failure of the German Socialist Party (SPD), the German Communist Party (KPD) and the trade unions to offer clear resistance before 1933 meant that the opposition to the Nazis was unlike resistance in occupied Europe, without a clear message or a unifying leader, and the Nazis were successful in crushing organised opposition. In power, the Nazi Party was also able to use the authority it had gained from its pact with the traditional elites, in the process of ‘coordinating’ existing state institutions. The second generation of opposition groups, active from 1936 onwards, were opposed by a plethora of state agencies. Having to survive denunciations and infiltrations at home, they also received little help from foreign governments. They organised in a society where any institutions which might have been a base for resistance were crushed.

      Despite these constraints, there was opposition, which existed at several different levels. First, there was organised resistance, acts against the regime with the conscious aim of replacing it. Examples include Communist Party members, especially in 1933–6, who attempted to build an illegal mass organisation with the aim of overthrowing Hitler through insurrection. In large factories and in solid working-class areas, acts of resistance, including leafleting and slogan-painting, continued through the Nazi period. The category of resistance would also include the White Rose group, active in Munich in 1942–3. These latter were students, who distributed leaflets, calling for sabotage and passive resistance. The same spirit of resistance could be seen even in the concentration camps, in the revolts of the prisoners who disarmed the jailors at Flossenbürg in May 1944 and Mauthausen in January 1945. It could be seen in Treblinka in August 1943, with an escape in which 300 prisoners killed eleven Schutzstaffel (SS) men and fled, with dozens of the participants retaining their freedom and surviving the war. It was visible two months later at Sobibor when 750 prisoners rose up and fought their guards. It could be seen even in Auschwitz in October 1944, when 450 Jews set fire to one of the crematoria, succeeded in cutting through the fences in which they were trapped and reaching the outside of the camp before being killed.¹⁰¹

      Then, there was opposition, often partial or limited, but still conscious and openly hostile to at least the decisions taken by the regime. This category included individual workers, who attempted to break the fuses in their factories, who disabled transformers or who sabotaged wartime production. This kind of protest also included groups like the Edelweiss Pirates,¹⁰² many of whom came from working-class or Communist backgrounds, and who attacked and fought members of the Hitler Youth. As the war effort stagnated, some German conservatives took part in acts of resistance, including the Stauffenberg Bomb Plot of July 1944, when senior military figures who had played a full part in the war regime grasped that Hitler was leading Germany to defeat and determined to kill him.¹⁰³

      Finally, there was dissent: softer expressions of disagreement. Several million Germans took part in forms of protest of this nature, from withholding children from the Hitler Youth, to declining to give to collections, listening to enemy radio broadcasts or ignoring the ban on contact with prisoners of war.¹⁰⁴

      Similar dynamics can be listed in Italy, although there resistance began earlier, went far deeper and in 1943 benefited from a crisis in the ruling group which enabled resistance to emerge on a mass scale.¹⁰⁵

       The Holocaust

      The Italian fascist regime was slow to adopt anti-Semitism: Jews could join the PNF, and there were individual Jews among Mussolini’s friends and confidants. The highest-profile Jewish fascists were Guido Jung, Mussolini’s minister of finance between 1932 and 1935, and Margherita Sarfatti, who was an early biographer of Mussolini, and his lover. Both Jung and Sarfatti converted to Christianity after Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship became established.¹⁰⁶ As late as December 1934, at the Montreux conference referred to earlier, the Italian fascists argued for their sister parties to adopt a racial theory of history without anti-Semitism.¹⁰⁷ By this point, attacks on Jews had already begun in the Italian fascist press. While there were some supporters of the regime who spoke out against anti-Semitism, there were also an increasing number of prominent fascists calling for the harmonisation of Italian and German fascism by adopting the politics of the latter, including Roberto Farinacci, who had previously been general secretary of the PNF and was still a member of the Fascist Grand Council, and Julius Evola, later a prominent figure in attempts to revive the postwar far right.¹⁰⁸ The state adopted Nazi-style race policies, beginning with a Manifesto of the Racial Scientists and culminating in a series of laws drafted by Mussolini and adopted in autumn 1938.¹⁰⁹ These revoked the Italian citizenship of any Jews who had acquired it since 1919, prohibited marriages between Italians and foreigners and separated Jews and gentiles in schools and universities.¹¹⁰

      Moreover, the fact that there was little official anti-Semitism before 1938 does not mean to say that Italy was free of racism. The war in Ethiopia from October 1935 was defended in racist terms – the Ethiopians were incapable of ruling themselves. The war was also conducted in a racist way: because the fascist state considered that the indigenous people were less than human, it butchered them with poison gas, like animals.¹¹¹ In Italian fascist thinking, the purpose of fascism was to mobilise the people for racial war. This is how the publication Partito e Impere described the role of the party in 1938: ‘Never to allow the Italian people to rest, to urge them on, to foster among them the urge to expand indefinitely in order to survive, to instil in them a sense of superiority of our race over the blacks ... In short, we must try to give the СКАЧАТЬ