A huge state apparatus of oppression was set into motion as the Nazis began arresting, torturing, and incarcerating anarchists and members of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, including those with seats in the Reichstag. In their last move before dissolving, the National Party and the Catholic Center granted Hitler dictatorial powers through a piece of legislation called the Enabling Act, voted on in one of Berlin’s opera houses after the Reichstag fire. The Nazis hastily eliminated the autonomy of state governments and placed authority under the central administration. They then hosted a giant parade, proclaiming the slogan “Honor work, respect the worker,” and occupied the trade union offices the next day, confiscating their funds and sending their leaders to dismal concentration camps. Many would never again know freedom.
Within a year, stagnation on the labor front led to cries for a “second revolution” issued from the SA and even Goebbels’s propaganda machine. Department stores were raided, consistent with the Nazi Party’s initial pseudo-anticapitalist platform. Along with Jewish businesses, synagogues were ransacked and destroyed, while the SA’s leadership militated for a new popular army from the SA to replace the old martial class of the Reich. Rumors spread that Röhm was meeting with reactionary politicians Schleicher and Heinrich Brüning, as well as Gregor Strasser, to create a new cabinet under a new chancellor.
According to his own account given to the Reichstag, Hitler held a meeting with Röhm that lasted five hours: “I informed him that I had the impression from countless rumors and numerous declarations of faithful old party members and SA leaders that conscienceless elements were preparing a national Bolshevist action that could bring nothing but untold misfortune to Germany.”141 The Prussian army establishment and Hitler decided that the only way to retain the certainty of his place would be to dispose of the “second revolution.” In the blood purge of June 29–July 2, 1934, also known as the Röhm Purge and the Night of the Long Knives, the SS murdered the leaders of the SA, along with former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife in their home, Gregor Strasser, former chancellor Franz von Papen’s personal secretary, and scores of other purported collaborators and accomplices, including Röhm himself. Hitler thus secured the army’s support through a bloodbath, slaughtering both the purported “left faction” and the reactionary opposition. Shortly after Hindenburg’s death from old age, the Reichstag gave Hitler the full powers of the presidency.
The rise of fascism was achieved through intrigue, betrayal, and deceit. Ultranationalism and the leader cult were the grounds for manipulation of gullible opposition on the radical right, while Hitler exploited the weakness of moderates and developed convergences with radical elements of the left. Though the outcome of fascism is an overarching, powerful, and centralized state, its rise is typically attained through paramilitary fighting forces equipped to murder and assassinate, to break strikes and meetings, and to generally disenfranchise the organized left (Socialist parties, Communist parties, large unions and syndicates) from their radical base. Resistance was forced underground, and those who continued to struggle did so however they could—through clandestine publishing, sabotage, assisting the flight of refugees, forming secret syndicates and unions, even adhering to “degenerate” styles and music.
Deceit and Angst
Although fascism is generally typified by its “outcomes,” it should instead be seen as a deceptive movement rarely forthright about its destination. People change as power changes them, and one can never know what the promises of one year will lead to in the next. However, as early as 1919, there were clear signs that Hitler fully intended to become a ruthless dictator. His sleight of hand had been to create a large gap between ideology and action, so that the former could attract idealists to the cause, while the latter could dispose of the unfaithful, leaving an apparently limitless horizon of possibilities within the movement. Both Hitler and Mussolini also positioned themselves prominently as people who respected the rules, despite persistently demonstrating their disregard for the law.
Even in the early 1920s, Mussolini characterized his party as one that could cooperate within the parliamentary system, and until 1935, he took a rather light hand in economic interventions, allowing instead a relatively free rein of big corporations. Italian Fascism in power was heavily supported by conservative and liberal elites, and under its rule, taxes on the rich were lowered, wages were cut, infant mortality increased, and food consumption fell. Their original left-wing rhetoric proved ludicrous as they settled into a largely conservative regime based on family, work, and patriotism.142
Meanwhile, from 1934 to 1936, Nazi Germany launched a totalitarian economic plan involving a massive and unwieldy bureaucracy that proved problematic for large industrialists and small businesses alike. Known as Gleichschaltung, which means coordination or consolidation, the system brought different sectors of culture and economy under the political control of the growing Nazi bureaucracy. The model involved sweeping financial reforms and increased production to boost the economy out of the Depression, but the key to Gleichschaltung did not simply lie in the ordering of labor and concentration camps in time and space. It actualized a “bringing into line” of the Volk’s self-presentation and perception. Labor and recreation regimens toughened up men’s bodies and minds for future war, while the imperative of satisfying men and tending to the tasks of motherhood remained a constant pressure on women.143
The psychology of fascism, and particularly Nazism, was and remains one of overwhelming angst from which some kind of collective catharsis might liberate the individual. As a release from the psychology of angst, youth-centered groups and programs became extremely important. Young Germans were sent for an extended time into the countryside to work in the fields and learn the proper völkisch philosophy outside of the classroom. A neurotic emphasis on hygiene also became critical, as the physician took the dominant aesthetic role in society. “Degenerate” or “unclean” art was banned and books were burned. Jewish people faced increasing terror at home and in the workplace, while the German Reich offered the working class the promise of cleaner, modernized factories in which to spend their hours. In 1935, the notorious Nuremberg racial laws were passed.
Jews could no longer be citizens of Nazi Germany, they no longer had rights, but the Nazis’ popularity continued to rise. As the social programs vaunted the völkisch ideals of the German race, a leader cult developed around Hitler, and the Führer was compared to Martin Luther and even the Messiah sent by God.144 Yet the Führer’s grasp on power remained complicated. He had to contend with different levels of autonomy maintained by other Nazi leaders, the party apparatus, the old officialdom of Weimar, the different regional and central hierarchies, the SS, and the Wehrmacht.145
Disunity
The emergence of fascism in Germany was not immediately embraced by Mussolini, because Hitler’s militarism presented serious pragmatic geopolitical, cultural, and political challenges.146 In 1934, shortly after Hitler took power, Italy brought together fascist and parafascist leaders from all over the world to appreciate a “universal fascism” at a conference in Montreux, Switzerland. It completely failed to unite fascists or even provide a basic platform, and the effects of fascist disunity were present almost immediately. When the Nazis threatened the sovereignty of Austrian fascists by assassinating Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrofascists drew closer to Mussolini, and the Spanish Falangists supported the Rome-Vienna axis of “Southern Fascism,” denouncing the machinations of Berlin.147
In Spain, fascist groups competed with one another within the country, alternately identifying themselves with or against fascism depending on the situation, while excommunicating and denouncing other fascist groups as not fascist enough. The leader of the Spanish Falangists, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, rejected the “fascistized right” represented by Calvo Sotelo.148 Months later, the leader of the Spanish National Syndicalists, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, abandoned an alliance with the Falange (or was expelled), stating that the