19 The Origins of World War II and the Holocaust:

The success of the Bolsheviks in taking and retaining power in the former Russian Empire reinforced the appeals of Communism in western and central Europe.

Communism may be seen as a product of the failures of the democratic left.
Fear of Communism was central to the appeals of Fascism, making it an extreme left-wing product and an extreme right-wing product.

After 1917, the revolution failed to spread out of Russia.

The program of the extreme left everywhere, whether Bolshevik-inspired or more indigenous, was intensified by the Communist rule in Russia, which promised to spread revolution to all corners of the world.
Mussolini was popular with conservatives outside Italy in his first decade of rule.
Hitler, too, was initially looked on with favor by many conservatives inside Germany and other countries, as an alternative to left-wing rule, whether social-democratic or Communist, until the mid-1930s.

The depres sion that began in late 1929 was the most important factor in bolstering the radical right.

The assumption of power by the Nazis in Germany in late January 1933 was a turn of events with far greater implications than Mussolini's take over in Italy.

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In the early 1920s, it was thought that Fascism was not the progenitor of an international movement, but was derived from specific Italian conditions.

Mussolini became prime minister of Italy in 1922 because of parliamentary democracy that had never been strong, and it was by no means obvious what he and his movement represented.
Italy was not considered a major power until Mussolini's party was small.

It has been difficult to arrive at a satisfactory definition of Fascism due to the fact that the Italian party underwent a significant transformation between 1919 and 1939.

It appeared a work in progress, mixing a variety of low resentments and soaring rhetoric, rightwing and left-wing, so much so that its status as a coherent ideology in the 19th century was doubted.
The Italian Fascist movement's crushing of the revolutionary left was the most lasting element of the mix.
The Italian Socialist Party was seen as one of the most revolutionary in Europe, but its split into pro- and non-Communist groups in early 1921 weakened the socialist left, but did little to alleviate the alarms of Italy's property-owning classes.
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Many of the people initially attracted to the term "Fascism" were idealists, who were inclined to excuse its brutal methods because Bolshevism seemed to represent a more radical moral evil.

Millions of ordinary citizens in Italy saw a threat not only to their material possessions but also to their personal safety and religious beliefs.

The alarms about social revolution meshed with national pride.

The humiliations on the battlefield and the rejection at the Paris Peace Conference of Italy's claims to the full spoils of victory offended Italian patriotism.
Italians have suffered from the disdain of other Europeans since Italy's less-than-inspiring achievement of national unity in the mid-eighteenth century.

Mussolini moved with caution in his first year as prime minister, trying to appear reasonable and respectable while trying to gain better control of his own movement's hostile factions.

The Fascist "March on Rome" in 1922 was more propaganda than reality, as Mussolini's assumption of formal political power had little about it that was revolutionary.

Mussolini's becoming prime minister was based on backstage political maneuvering, not a storming of the barricades, although the threat of Fascist violence played an important role in that political maneuvering.

Italy had reached a point of political stalemate by late 1922.

The two largest parties in the postwar election refused to work together in parliament.
They agreed on many issues of short-term social and economic reform, but were bitterly divided over the issue of Catholic religion.
Appointing Mussolini as prime minister was a long shot, even though the Fascist Party had only thirty-five members.

Mussolini's assumption of political power was similar to the Bolsheviks' victory because other parties had failed to offer effective rule.

Mussolini had more to do with the faulty calculations of those in power than with the strength of the Fascist movement.

Similar to the situation in Russia, few observers expected Mussolini to last long.
Many concluded that the Fascists and Bolsheviks were unable to rule a major nation for very long because they lacked practical political experience.
It would be better for Mussolini and his party to reveal their incompetence than to fight them.

The situations in Italy and Russia were different.

The breakdown of authority in Russia was more complete.

Mussolini's long-range intent was uncertain, whereas the Bolsheviks were intent on obliterating established social and economic relations.
Most of the people who supported him becoming prime minister were committed to preserving the existing social and economic order.
The results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly were not accepted by the Bolsheviks.
The police and military were not opposed to Mussolini becoming prime minister because he was appointed by the king.

Mussolini's supporters were convinced that he would be transformed by Italian parliamentary life even if he did not make a fool of himself.

They launched a reign of terror in northeastern Italy after the war.
They violently pushed aside the legally elected local governments in a number of towns.

Similar terms would be used by Hitler's followers.

The second revolution was connected with Mussolini's claims that he was the leader of a new movement.

The claims appealed to the young.
He mocked the left as overly intellectual.
Italy has a tendency of its politicians engaging in flowery oratory with little follow-through, so he called for less talk and more action.

Mussolini came with a bunch of meanings.

He claimed to have incorporated the ideas of prewar anti-positivists such as Sorel and Nietzsche into Fascist doctrine, but he also made admiring remarks about their revolutionary audacity: their breaking free of prewar, overly deterministic Marxist theory.

Mussolini's personal history suggested clashing symbolisms and associations.

He was the son of a blacksmith.

Mussolini was known for his fiery oratory as leader of the Italian socialist movement.
He broke with the policy of not supporting or opposing the war and declared himself in favor of Italy's entering the war on the side of the Entente.
Mussolini was kicked out of the party because of this betrayal.
He returned to journalism in support of the war after he was wounded at the front.
He had close associations with other veterans of the front and with wealthy businessmen.
For a number of years he tried to wean Italy's working class away from the Socialist and Communist parties, but he was unsuccessful.

In early 1919, when the Fascist movement was officially founded (becoming a formal political party in late 1921), its program contained many leftist elements, including several that were particularly contrary to what Fascism eventually came to represent.

Mussolini was against racism and antisemitism in the first decade of the Fascist movement.
What the Fascists became best known for was their action in violent clashes with the PSI and its associated organizations, in which the Fascists usually emerged victorious.

Feminism evolved from being a vaguely antiestablishment move ment, left-wing but also nationalist, into one more linked to right-wing causes and supported by wealthy donors.

Much of the 1919 program was abandoned by 1929.

Mussolini had limited options in his first year as prime minister.

He was the leader of a coalition of right-center parties.

Mussolini assumed the posts of foreign minister and interior minister, as well as prime minister, despite the fact that the Fascists held only fourteen cabinet posts.

He gained stature for himself and his party after the elections of April 1924.
The Fascist Party won more seats in parliament than any other party, and the electoral coalition of which the Fascists were a part won more seats than any other party.
The elections were not a model of liberal-democratic procedure.

Mussolini's full program seemed to have been given the green light.

The Matteotti Affair was a major crisis that he faced.
The Socialist deputy, known for his stinging criticism of the Fascists, was murdered in June 1924.
There was evidence that one of Mussolini's lieutenants was responsible for the crime.
Both the political left and right in Italy expressed disgust at Mussolini's role in the country, and some Fascists were concerned about his ability to control his followers.
Mussolini seemed hesitant in defending himself.

After regaining his composure, he realized that if he was to survive, he needed to get more power into his hands.

He began issuing decrees that made Italy a one-party state.
The Fascist Party was the only legal party, and many of the leaders of the other parties had fled into exile.
Mussolini's destruction of parliamentary democracy did not bother most of his admirers inside or outside Italy.
Tourists returning from the country reported that Fascist rule had restored order and that the trains ran on time. "

Relations between Italian fascists and German Nazism were not good at this point.

The leading Fascists believed that Hitler's movement was a form of barbarism that the Italians found reprehensible.
A number of Jews were appointed to prominent positions in the Fascist government after they participated in the Fascist March on Rome in 1922.
The husband of Mussolini's long-time Jewish mistress and official biographer was a prominent supporter of the fascists.
The relationship between Hitler and Mussolini was not as close as it could have been in the late 1920s.
Hitler tried to make contact with Mussolini, but he did not respond.

The decade following Mussolini's ascent to power saw the proliferation of movements and parties throughout Europe that claimed inspiration from Fascist Italy.

Each differed from the Italian model in a number of ways, but all expressed disgust with the established institutions and ideals.
Most had a penchant for uniforms and a talent for symbols and slogans.
Most of the people who claimed to be inspired by Mussolini were antisemitic, though not all.
The leader of the right-wing Zionisms was an obvious exception.
Jabotinsky copied Mussolini's oratorical style and openly embraced Fascist organizing techniques, but his attempts to establish personal contacts with Mussolini were no more successful than Hitler's.
Left-wingers detested Jabotinsky as much as Fascists.

The prewar anti-positivist and populist tendencies in their own countries were built upon by most admirers of Italian Fascism.

The link between Communism and Jews was denounced as a major theme.
After 1929, Fascist sympathizers blamed Jews involved in finance for the world economic crisis, but more generally Jews on both the left and right were described as members of a destructive race.
A number of right-wing leaders came to support the Zionism project after the Balfour Declaration, which advocated moving Jews from Europe to Palestine.

The term became a negative epithet for the left by the mid-1920s.

Fascists were denounced by Marxists as a device of capitalism.
As early as 1922, Hitler was described by one of his followers as a "German Mussolini," and from the beginning of his career, he expressed admiration for Mussolini and Italian fascists.

The relationship between Hitler's and Mussolini's movements remained murky into the 1930s.

Mussolini told the Austrian ambassador to Italy that it was better to leave the Jews alone.
Mussolini's personal encounter with the new Fuhrer left him unimpressed.
He ridiculed Hitler as a record with only seven songs.

Mussolini and other Fascists did not seem to be angry with Hitler.

It's not clear how much he knew about their comments, but some of them reached him.
What he made of Mussolini's Jewish financial supporters, advisers, and Fascist party members - to say nothing of the Italian leader's Jewish mistress - remains a mystery.
There are many puzzles about Hitler's inner convictions, but his thoughts about Jews in the Italian Fascist movement are the most elusive.

In Spain, where liberal-democratic institutions were even weaker than in Italy and where there had also been violent lower-class unrest toward the end of the war, a military takeover took place in September 1923.

Mussolini had been named prime minister by Italy's king, less than a year before he was named prime minister by King Alfonso XIII.

Another figure who made favorable comments about Italian fascists was Primo de Rivera.

Mussolini initiated a large-scale program of public works as a way to help the laboring masses in Spain.
The Spanish leader took steps to grant citizenship to Jews of Spanish origin who had been expelled from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century, like Mussolini did.

It was obvious that Mussolini lacked political agility.

He was an attractive, colorful personality, but he was never able to get the kind of broad support that Mussolini did.

A military man from the landed aristocracy, he was more tied to established elites than Mussolini and showed less success in managing them.
Mussolini gained in power and popularity in the late 1920s, but Primo de Rivera experienced growing frustration.
He left Spain in 1930 and died in exile a few months later.
The Falange, formed by his son, is substantially different from the Italian model.
During the Spanish Civil War in 1936-9, he allied with General Francisco Franco, a traditional monarchist who was widely considered a Fascist.

Mussolini's signing of the Lateran Accords in 1929 established a truce in the longstanding hostility of the papacy and the Italian state.

The Christian Social Party's main attraction was Mussolini's destruction of the Marxist left, since in Austria the Social Democrat Party was the main opponent of the Christian Socials.
The Christian Socials were able to claim that they had destroyed Marxism, like the Fascists in Italy did.

The Austrian clerico-Fascists resembled the Italian Fascists in many ways, but their embrace of Catholic religion made it hard for a more complete imitation.

He and many of his lieutenants were known for their anti-Catholicism.

The Austrian Christian Socials in power wanted to destroy the Marxists but also wanted to outlaw the Austrian Nazi Party.
The Christian Social chancellor was murdered in 1934.

The Austrian case shows that the differences between Italian Fascism and German Nazism were substantial up to the mid-1930s.

Many people who admired Mussolini were horrified by Hitler and Nazi racism.

The question of how the Nazis came to power has fascinated historians of Europe.

Many impressive works of history have scrutinized what the Nazis did with that power.
Since human beings had committed acts of grotesque cruelty and mass murder throughout history, the issue has not been so much that human beings did such things.
The issue has been how such things happened in a nation that is considered to be among Europe's most educated and civilized.
Criminals gained control of a modern nation during the Nazi years.

Fascist Italy was more threatening and attractive than Nazi Germany.

Hitler claimed to take Nazi ideology seriously, even if he often privately mocked the writings of the party's official ideologue.
He ignored large parts of the original Nazi Party program.
He blew hot and cold on the topic of the Jews throughout the 1920s and 1930s, causing endless speculation.
He recognized a change in his approach to gaining power.
The failure of the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923 convinced him that he needed to come to power through legal means, which meant winning over a majority of Germany's population in free elections.
Learning how to say what various audiences wanted to hear, even if that contradicted what he said to other audiences was what Hitler had to learn.

Hitler was released from prison in 1925.

He toned down his radical rhetoric when speaking to people who were put off by his talk of revolution and by racist rhetoric.
The general who had allied with Hitler in the 1923 Putsch publicly accused him of betraying the antisemitic cause after he softened his tone towards the Jews in the late 1920s.
Hitler commented that Jews had nothing to fear from the Nazi movement.

Hitler and his party made some progress in the late 1920s, despite being on the margins of the country's political life.

The party grew from 27,000 members in 1925 to 108,000 in 1928, with Hitler cementing his position as leader.

The reorganization of the German Communist Party took place in the 1920s.
Once "objective conditions" changed, both parties were ready for action.

The Nazi Party became Germany's largest party thanks to the help of the Depression, a symbol of failed liberal democracy and capital ism.

Without the economic collapse, Hitler and his movement would not have made it into the history books.
Massive unemployment was caused by the Depression in Germany.
During the chaotic period from the autumn of 1929 to early 1932, the electoral support of the NSDAP rose from around 2 percent of the popular vote to 37 percent, in the process attracting many who were voting for it.
When the Fascists and the Bolsheviks first assumed political power, the NSDAP was better organized and more popular than either of them.
It was obvious that Hitler's ability to tap the emotions of a profoundly troubled population and draw to him personally was of paramount importance.
In free elections, the Nazis never won a majority of the vote.
Their strength was in the countryside and in small and medium-sized towns.

The growth of the German Communist Party (KPD) between 1929 and 1932 propelled those who feared Communism toward the Nazis.

The KPD is the only hard anti-Fascist party and it was pushed by Nazi growth.

It was thought that antisemitism was a fundamental part of Nazi success.

In the prewar period, many have argued that antisemitism reached its logical culmination.

Much about this picture is plausible for parts of the population, but scholars in recent decades have cast doubt on the extent to which hatred of Jews acted as an emotional unifier of Germany's population.

Evidence shows that antisemitism divided Germany's population as much as it united it.
The program of undoing the civil equality granted Jews in the nineteenth century never came close to being passed by the Reichstag.
The success of Mussolini's model in the 1920s was due in part to Mussolini explicitly and repeatedly rejecting antisemitism.
According to a number of studies, most Nazi Party members did not place antisemitism among the most important reasons for joining the party; other issues, economic and nationalist, were more important, though of course they overlap with antisemitism.

Hitler did not believe that he had the power to read the minds of his audience.

In the late 1920s, he toned down his attacks on Jews because he concluded that radical antisemitism only appealed to a small group of Germans.
Hitler made vague statements about how the Jewish Question would be solved.
The violent rhetoric of his earlier years was replaced by milder words suggesting the possibility of a moderate solution to the issue.
Hitler believed that the German people were incapable of understanding the seriousness of the Jewish danger and that popular consent to radical anti-Jewish measures was not to be expected.

By late 1938, those who hoped that Hitler actually believed in a moderate solution were obliged to recognize that his hopes were in vain.

When war broke out in 1939, it became easier to implement violent solutions.
The Final Solution, the most radical and violent of all possible solutions, was never publicly announced by Hitler.
The Final Solution was kept a secret because it wouldn't get popular approval.

The origins, nature, and evolution of Hitler's personal beliefs about Jews have evolved into a contentious literature.

Both "what Hitler really meant" and "what Marx really meant" have much to do with the statements made by both Hitler and Marx.

Scholars have uncovered intriguing evidence of friendly contacts with Jews before 1919, as well as expressions of respect for a number of Jewish individuals.

It was not a novel conclusion since it was the main theme of the antisemites of the 1880s.

Hitler did not mention the theorists of antisemitism before 1914.
The man whom he credited with having exercised a major intellectual influence, the "fatherly friend" he met when he moved from Vienna to Munich in 1913, was a bohemian artist largely unknown to the wider world.

Hitler and Nazism were notorious for being different from the crudely biological ones.

Even though he considered Jews to be materialistic and destructive, he still believed that such tendencies exist in all people.
It was necessary for any nation to have some degree of Jewishness.
The solution to the Jewish Question was not mass murder, but a spiritual inner struggle by Aryans to free themselves from Jewish materialistic tendencies.

Hitler had contact with many other types of antisemites, but his account of them does not allow for confident conclusions about what he actually came to believe.

The point at which a "Final" solution was accepted by Hitler may never be known with certainty, but much evidence suggests that it was not until World War II began.
Hitler didn't have the power to put his ideas into practice in the 1920s.
Even as his power grew in the 1930s, he remained open to various concrete options, though almost certainly none that were moderate or that Jews themselves would welcome.

The debate about Hitler's intentions in relation to the Jews resembles discussions in the 1920s and 1930s about whether Hitler's antisemitism was genuine or insincere.

Although Lueger at times attacked Jews viciously, he retained Jewish advisers and personal friends, and for all his rhetorical bluster, finally did little to harm Vienna's Jewish population.
Jews continued to move into Vienna while he was mayor.

The conclusion that Hitler was opportunist in his dealings with the Jewish people is consistent with the view that he is politically shallow and concerned with acquiring power.

He moved in reaction to opportunities that he could not have foreseen and that at times seemed contrary to his stated ideological commitments in most of his major political decisions.
Hitler could be said to have had the same taste for opportune action as Mussolini and Lenin.
The way in which Hitler became chancellor in January 1933 was obvious.

Hitler and Mussolini were invited to power by conservative power brokers who thought they could manipulate them to protect their own interests.

At this time, he is trying to appear as a respectable leader, not a demagogue.

In an exhausting series of hard-fought elections from late 1929 to early 1932, it seemed that Hitler's once-marginal party was heading toward winning an absolute majority.

In the November 1932 elections, the popular vote for the NSDAP dropped from 37 percent to 33 percent.
It suggested that support for Hitler's party had reached its limit.
This was seen as the beginning of the end for Hitler and the Nazis.
His success was exposed as a flash in the pan and his demagoguery was coming back to haunt him.
The party's finances were exhausted, the party's morale was faltering, and hundreds of thousands of people stopped voting for it.
When Hitler was offered the post of chancellor in January 1933, he accepted it even though he had previously stated that he would never accept a majority of nonNazis in his cabinet.

It has been said that Hitler wasn't "elected" chancellor.

The chancellors were appointed by the president on the basis of the Reichstag majority of allied parties.
In the last free elections of the Weimar Republic, the NSDAP only won a third of the popular vote.
In early 1933, Hitler and his party faced a lot of suspicion and unease, but they were not exposed as fit to rule.
The official line from Moscow went even further, proclaiming that Hitler's appointment should be considered a source of satisfaction since it reflected the desperation of the ruling elites.
The proletarian revolution was about to start.

The reality was quite different.

The destruction of the revolutionary left, the elimination of other parties, and the establishment of a one-party state were accomplished by Hitler in the months immediately following his appointment as chancellor.
Hitler time after time made snap decisions based on unforeseen events, rather than operating according to a detailed plan.
He and his advisers were alarmed by the news that the Reichstag building had been set on fire.
At first, Hitler thought that the fire was part of a Communist counteroffensive.
He used the fire as a pretext to crush the KPD.
The elections that followed soon after, on March 5, with the KPD outlawed and a wave of anti-Communist alarm gripping Germany, gave the Nazis just under 44 percent of the popular vote.
The Catholic Center Party, the right-wing Nationalists, and the other parties were persuaded by Hitler to vote for the Enabling Act, which gave him the majority he wanted.

Private and public agencies used to be independent.

It did not involve any major attacks on property rights or a redistribution of income, except for the fact that Jews had positions in them.

More than a year after becoming chancellor, Hitler was not in "total" con trol.

He faced a crisis like the one in Italy.

The turbulent and lawless elements of the Nazi Party were more of an issue than they had been in the Fascist Party in 1924, and whether Hitler would be able to control them was even more important.

It is the most serious internal crisis faced by Hitler in his first years in office.

Hitler faced a less-admiring President in 1933, just as Mussolini faced the king after destroying Italy's non-Fascist parties.

The leaders of Germany's military elite viewed Hitler and his movement with growing alarm, which made them more concerned about Hitler than about his relationship with Hindenburg.

German elites believed that Hitler and his lieutenants were not fit to rule because of their lack of experience.

The Nazi Party in January 1933 was unprepared for the complexity of ruling a major modern nation according to the historian Hans Mommsen.
Without the cooperation of those experienced elites, Nazi rule would have been much more difficult than it was.

After the Reichstag fire, Hitler's first year of rule was termed "cautious", but he was aware of the precariousness of his power even after the Enabling Act was passed.

There was open warfare between the old army and the new ones.

The old-line generals would never accept being subservient to the likes of Rohm, not only for his corruption but also for his homosexuality.

Hitler was told by the generals that he would have to take control of the Brown Shirts if the military supported him in his plans to take over the presidency.

Hitler did it in spades.
Himmler was one of the most bitter rivals of Rohm.
The night of June 30, 1934, several hundred people, including a few who had nothing to do with the Brown Shirts but who were on Hitler's enemy list, were murdered.

Hitler accomplished a lot more than is often recognized by conducting a ruthless blood purge of those known as "old fighters" - long-time Nazis, many of whom were considered among his closest personal friends.

Their enthusiasm was based on the belief that ruthless action by Hitler was justified since the civil war in Germany was about to start.
The Night of the Long Knives claimed hundreds of lives, but a war like that would have cost more.
His supporters believed that Hitler had dealt with the Brown Shirts the same way he had dealt with the Communists.
Hitler could be pitiless in dealing with his own followers even if he felt it was necessary.

The purge of the SA leadership had little to do with Jews, but the rowdier acts of anti-Jewish violence in previous years had been associated with the Brown Shirts.

They wanted to take ill-gotten Jewish wealth and property.
The principle of private property, even Jewish private property, alarmed many who otherwise looked on the Nazis with favor.
In times of crisis, Hitler appeared as the necessary iron- willed leader, doing the unpleasant but essential work of destroying radicals on the left and the right in order to save Germany, protect property rights, and assure safety on the streets.

The passage of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935 was seen by many as the same thing.

The laws have been described as another step in an escalating antisemitic program in Nazi Germany, stripping Jews of civil equality and outlawing sexual relations between them and Aryan Germans.
Many Germans saw the laws as a move by Hitler to calm rather than increase hatred of Jews.

In a speech defending the laws, he reported that he had been given drafts of more drastic legislation by experts from the Ministry of the Interior, but he had decided upon the most moderate of the drafts.

He stressed the importance of obeying the law.

The period from June 30, 1934 to March of 1938 may be considered the high point for Hitler and the Nazi regime, their golden years of growing prestige and apparent economic recovery.

The 1936 Olympics were hosted by Nazi Germany.
The tourists praised the new regime after returning from the games.

Few people reported seeing persecution of Jews.

While most of the industrialized world remained mired in the Depression, politically fractured and torn by strikes and street violence, Nazi Germany seemed to be prospering economically, its people united behind their beloved Fuhrer.
German athletes won more medals in the Berlin Olympics than any other country.

Communism was seen as more evil than the Nazism.

Hundreds of deaths could be blamed on the Nazi regime, whereas millions of deaths could be blamed on the Soviet regime.

Slave labor became a major part of the Soviet economy by that time, but it wasn't until 1939 that it became a part of Nazi Germany.

Many observers in the western democracies described themselves as being caught between two evils, each claiming to be the voice of the future.

Leftists in the west sympathized with the Soviet Union.

Moderates hoped that the two powers would destroy each other.
The pact of non-aggression signed by the Nazis and the Soviets shocked everyone.
The two powers were allies.
The diplomatic developments of the 1930s need to be examined in order to understand how that portentous reversal came to pass.

There are more biographies of Hitler than of any other individual in modern European history.

There are many studies of the Holocaust in the Further Reading sections of Chapter 19, Chapter 20, and Chapter 21.

There is a wide range of interpretations of the Holocaust.