11.6 — How Fascism and Nazism Worked

Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933 by the President, through a constitutional procedure, at the head of a coalition in which his party held three of eleven cabinet posts.

The conservative politicians who arranged it believed they were using him. Franz von Papen, who brokered the deal, is reported to have said that within two months they would have pushed him into a corner so hard that he would squeak.

Within six months every other political party in Germany had been dissolved or banned.

Understanding how six months is enough is the point of this chapter, because it was not achieved by a coup.

What fascism is

Defining it is genuinely difficult — Mussolini's movement, Hitler's, and the various others differed substantially — and a working list of features is more useful than a definition.

Extreme nationalism, with the nation conceived as an organic body with a destiny, and the individual subordinate to it.

A myth of decline and rebirth. The nation was great, was betrayed and humiliated, and will be reborn through struggle. The historian Roger Griffin's term for this core is palingenetic ultranationalism, and it is the element common to every case.

A cult of the leader who embodies the national will, whose authority is personal rather than institutional.

Rejection of liberal democracy as weak, divisive and decadent, and of parliamentary debate as talk in place of action.

Rejection of Marxism, and hostility to independent trade unions — while adopting some socialist economic language and appealing to workers.

Violence as legitimate and as virtuous. Paramilitary organisations — the Blackshirts, the SA — are not incidental; the movement's public identity is physical.

Corporatism — the claim to resolve class conflict by organising employers and workers into state-directed bodies, in place of independent unions.

A designated internal enemy whose removal is required for national rebirth.

And a rejection of reason and evidence in favour of will, instinct and myth. Mussolini was explicit: fascism had no doctrine that could be written in advance, and was created out of a need for action.

Not every fascist movement was racially antisemitic. Italian Fascism was not, for its first sixteen years, and adopted racial laws in 1938 under German influence. German National Socialism placed race at the centre from the beginning, and this is the largest single difference between them.

Why Weimar failed

Germany's republic, founded in 1919, had a good constitution and did not survive.

It was born discredited. It signed the armistice and the treaty (Chapter 11.4), and the stab-in-the-back legend meant that democracy itself was associated with betrayal in the minds of a large part of the population.

Its constitution had two fatal design features.

Proportional representation with no threshold, which produced many small parties and unstable coalitions — twenty governments in fourteen years.

And Article 48, which permitted the President to rule by emergency decree. From 1930, before Hitler, Germany was already being governed by decree rather than by parliamentary majority. The democratic system had effectively stopped functioning three years before Hitler took office, which is a crucial fact.

Then two economic catastrophes. The hyperinflation of 1923 destroyed the savings of the middle class (Chapter 9.8). The Depression from 1929 produced unemployment around 30 percent (Chapter 9.9).

And the electoral record tracks the unemployment exactly. The Nazi vote was 2.6 percent in 1928, 18.3 percent in September 1930, and 37.3 percent in July 1932.

The elites made a calculation. Conservative politicians, industrialists and army leaders, frightened of communism and unable to govern with a parliamentary majority, chose to bring the Nazis into government to obtain their votes while retaining control.

They were wrong, and the error is the most instructive thing in this chapter. A movement that does not accept the legitimacy of the system cannot be co-opted by giving it a share of the system.

The six months

The sequence, because the speed is the lesson.

30 January 1933. Hitler appointed Chancellor.

27 February. The Reichstag fire. A Dutch communist was arrested at the scene. Whether the Nazis were involved is still argued; the current weight of scholarship favours the arsonist acting alone, and the party's response was immediate and prepared.

28 February. The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties — freedom of speech, press, assembly, the privacy of post and telephone, and protection from arbitrary arrest — indefinitely, under Article 48. It was never repealed.

5 March. Elections held under conditions of violence and with the opposition press suppressed. The Nazis got 43.9 percent — still not a majority.

23 March. The Enabling Act, giving the cabinet power to legislate without the Reichstag. It required a two-thirds constitutional majority. It was obtained by arresting or excluding communist deputies, by SA men filling the building, and by the Catholic Centre Party voting in favour after receiving assurances. Only the Social Democrats voted against, and their leader made a speech saying so, which took courage that is worth recording.

Then, in weeks: trade unions dissolved and replaced by a state labour front. All other parties banned or dissolved by July. State governments taken over. The civil service, courts, universities and cultural bodies purged of Jews and opponents.

And in June 1934, the Night of the Long Knives, in which the SA leadership was murdered along with various other inconvenient people. This bought the loyalty of the army, which had feared the SA as a rival, and demonstrated that murder was now an instrument of government.

When President Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of Chancellor and President and required the army to swear a personal oath of loyalty to him rather than to the constitution.

Eighteen months from appointment to absolute power, using legal instruments throughout.

How the state worked

Not, as is often assumed, as a perfectly organised machine.

Institutional chaos was the norm. Overlapping agencies competed for the leader's favour — party organisations, state ministries, the SS, the army, and personal fiefdoms. The historian Ian Kershaw's concept of working towards the Führer describes the mechanism: officials anticipated what Hitler wanted and acted on it, competing to produce more radical initiatives, without needing explicit orders.

This matters for understanding Chapter 11.9, because it explains how enormous crimes were organised without a comprehensive written plan.

Terror was targeted rather than universal at first. The first concentration camp, Dachau, opened in March 1933 for political prisoners. A German who was not Jewish, not a communist, not a Jehovah's Witness, not homosexual, not Roma and not disabled, and who kept quiet, could live an ordinary life — which is precisely why so many did.

Propaganda under Goebbels controlled press, radio, film and public spectacle. The cheap Volksempfänger radio was designed to receive German stations and not foreign ones.

And the economy recovered, which bought consent. Unemployment fell from around six million to near zero by 1939, through public works, rearmament, conscription and the removal of women and Jews from the workforce. The recovery was real and it was financed by concealed deficits and it required a war to remain solvent.

Italy

Mussolini came first — the March on Rome in October 1922 — and the details are less impressive than the legend. The march was a bluff by a few thousand poorly armed men; the army could have stopped it; the King chose not to declare martial law and instead invited Mussolini to form a government. He arrived by train.

His regime was less totalitarian in practice than Hitler's. The monarchy survived, the Church retained autonomy after the Lateran Treaty of 1929, and the party never fully controlled the state.

And it was violent and it was destructive. The murder of the socialist deputy Matteotti in 1924, the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 with chemical weapons used against civilians, and the racial laws of 1938.

The appeasement question

Why nobody stopped it, treated fairly.

The remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936 was the moment. German forces entering had orders to withdraw if the French moved. France did not move.

Why not. Memory of the First World War was overwhelming and both France and Britain believed the treaty was unjust (Chapter 11.4). Britain was rearming and not ready. Both feared aerial bombardment of their cities on a scale that turned out to be exaggerated but was sincerely believed. The Depression had left no money. And Britain had no continental commitment and no army capable of intervening.

Munich, September 1938. Chamberlain agreed to the transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany without Czechoslovak participation. Czechoslovakia had a modern army and strong frontier fortifications, and it was abandoned. Chamberlain returned saying peace for our time.

The defence of appeasement is that it bought a year of rearmament and that British public opinion would not have supported war in 1938. The prosecution is that the Czech army and its arms industry were handed to Germany, and that Hitler read the concession as confirmation that his opponents would not fight.

Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, which ended the argument.

And the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 — a non-aggression treaty between the two systems most ideologically opposed to each other, with a secret protocol dividing Poland and the Baltic states — removed Hitler's last constraint. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September; Britain and France declared war on 3 September.

The warning signs

A book that describes this without extracting the pattern has wasted the chapter.

The features that recur, in the historical cases, are these.

A grievance narrative of humiliation and betrayal, with an internal enemy identified as responsible.

Economic catastrophe or acute insecurity affecting a large group who feel their status falling.

A discredited political establishment, and a parliament visibly unable to govern.

Political violence normalised, and treated as understandable given the provocation.

Contempt for evidence and for institutions that check claims — courts, press, statistics offices, universities.

And elites who believe they can use the movement.

The last one is the most consistent and the least discussed. In Italy the King and the conservatives. In Germany von Papen, Hindenburg and the industrialists. In both cases the people who let them in were not fascists and thought they were being clever.

And the thing to notice about the German case specifically is that it was legal. Emergency powers already in use, an enabling act passed by the required majority, and courts that went along. A constitution is a piece of paper unless people refuse to do what it forbids. Chapter 6.27's Emergency in India was also legal, and it was reversed by an election.

Where this shows up in your life

Every constitution written since 1945 has provisions designed against this — Germany's Basic Law entrenches certain articles beyond amendment and permits the banning of anti-constitutional parties, and India's 44th Amendment made emergency powers far harder to use (Chapter 6.27).

And the word is used carelessly, which is a problem in both directions. Applying it to every opponent drains it of meaning and leaves no word for the actual thing. Refusing to apply it ever means the actual thing is never named. The list of features above is more useful than the label, and Chapter 16.4 recommends checking specific features rather than arguing about the word.

What the next page covers

Chapter 11.7 covers the Second World War in Europe — how the German army beat France in six weeks with fewer tanks, why the invasion of the Soviet Union was the decisive theatre and how the war was actually won there, what the strategic bombing campaign achieved and cost, and the honest accounting of who did what, because the popular memory in the English-speaking world is substantially out of proportion to where the fighting happened.