After the Communists became entrenched in power, elections to the soviets became an empty formality. Supreme authority in every field was in the hands of the ruling Communist party. Lenin is said to have remarked, half jokingly, that there could be any number of parties in Russia—on one condition: the Communist party must be in power, and all the other parties must be in jail. This was an excellent description of Soviet political practice.
The world had witnessed the birth of a new kind of state, based on the unlimited power of a single political party. This party regarded itself as an elite, required a period of probation for applicants for membership, and deliberately kept this membership restricted.
Events followed a different course in Italy. Yet the political result was similar in many respects. There had been a good deal of ferment and unrest in Italy after the war, with strikes, riots, stoppages of essential services. The Italian Communists and some of the Socialists dreamed of setting up a revolutionary dictatorship on the Soviet model.
But they were anticipated and defeated by an ex-Socialist, Benito Mussolini, who had become the evangel of another armed doctrine. This was fascism.
Communism was based on the economic teachings of Karl Marx, as interpreted by Lenin and by Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin. Fascism was a much more personal and eclectic type of theory, worked out by Mussolini after he had broken with socialism. Contrary to a general impression, Mussolini was not a conservative or an upholder of the status quo.
The type of state which gradually evolved in Italy after the Fascist March on Rome of October 29, 1922, was a break with Italy’s political past. The Fascist order emphasized the supremacy of the state over the individual. It tried to solve the clash of interest between capital and labor by making the government supreme arbiter in economic disputes. Fascism organized, indoctrinated, and drilled the youth, praised the martial virtues, gave the workers an organized system of free entertainment, tried to dramatize every economic problem in terms of a struggle in which every citizen must be a soldier.
Had there been no war, it is very unlikely that fascism, a creed which was alien to the easy-going and skeptical Italian temperament, would have conquered Italy. Many of Mussolini’s closest associates were veterans who disliked socialism and communism, wanted some kind of social change, and were attracted by Mussolini’s energetic personality and nationalist ideas. The Italian Leftists played into Mussolini’s hands by plunging the country into a state of chronic disorder, not enough to make a revolution, but enough to reconcile many middle-class Italians to Mussolini’s strong-arm methods of restoring order.
The gap between war and revolution was longest in Germany. Hunger and inflation made for civil strife in the years immediately after the end of the war. There were left-wing uprisings in Berlin and Munich and the Ruhr. There were also right-wing extremist movements against the republic.
By 1924, however, physical conditions had improved, and it seemed that a period of political stability had set in. Germany was admitted to the League of Nations. The Pact of Locarno, under which Great Britain and Italy guaranteed the existing Franco-German frontier, seemed to offer a prospect of eliminating the historic Franco-German feud.
But the hurricane of the world economic crisis, following the lost war and the inflation, which had ruined the German middle class, paved the way for the third great European political upheaval. This was the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist, or Nazi, party.
Of the three revolutionary “success stories” Hitler’s was the most remarkable. Both Lenin and Mussolini were men of political training and experience. But Hitler had absolutely none. There seemed to be nothing to mark him out among the millions of soldiers who had worn the field-gray uniform and fought through the war.
It would have seemed improbable fantasy if anyone had predicted that this completely unknown soldier would become the absolute ruler of Germany, set out on a Napoleonic career of conquest, and immolate himself in Wagnerian fashion after leading his country to the heights of military power and to the depths of collapse and complete defeat. But in Hitler’s case the factual record eclipsed the wildest fictional imagination.
Germany in years of severe crisis and heavy unemployment was responsive to a man who gave himself out as a wonder-worker, a savior. Hitler was a passionate, rapt, almost hypnotic orator in a country where there was little impressive public speaking. The very obscurity of his origin lent a romantic appeal. Perhaps the secret of his attraction lay in his apparent sympathy and affection. Sentimental as it was, and combined also with less obvious mistrust and scorn, his deceptive sympathy for the plight of the unemployed and the suffering made an impression quite unlike that made by the normal type of sober, stolid German politician, especially in such a period of despair and bitterness. Consequently Hitler exerted a powerful attraction on the German masses, who ordinarily took little interest in politics.
Hitler knew how to appeal to German instincts and prejudices. The ideal of the powerful state had always been popular. Hitler promised a “Third Reich,” more glorious than the two which had existed earlier. Interpretations of history in terms of race have long possessed a wide appeal in Germany. Hitler vulgarized and popularized the teachings of Teutonic race theorists like the Germanized Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Anti-Semitism had been strengthened in Germany after the war by two developments. Many leaders of Communist and extreme leftist movements—Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogisches, Kurt Eisner, to name a few—were of Jewish origin. Many Jews of eastern Europe, fleeing from pogroms and unsettled conditions, had migrated into Germany. Some of these East-European Jews took an active part in the speculation which was rampant in Germany because of the unstable currency and the shortage of commodities.
Of course these two groups, the political extremists and the speculators, had nothing whatever to do with each other. But Hitler exploited both in building up for his audiences a picture of the Jew as simultaneously a conscienceless exploiter and profiteer and a force for the subversion of national institutions.
Like the other modern revolutionaries, Lenin and Mussolini, Hitler profited from the weakness and division of his opponents. The German republic was born in a time of misery, defeat, and humiliation. It never captured the imagination or the enthusiastic loyalty of the German people.
The German labor movement might have been a bulwark against the Nazi onslaught, but it was split between the Social Democrats and the Communists. The latter, on orders from Moscow, concentrated their fire on the Social Democrats, not on the Nazis. They were acting on the highly mistaken calculation that Hitler’s victory would be followed by a reaction in favor of communism.
Whether Hitler reflected the will of the German people or whether they were victims of his dictatorship is often debated. No sweeping, unqualified answer can be accurate.
That the Nazi movement appealed to a strong minority of the Germans is indisputable. Hitler got 37 per cent of the votes cast in the election of 1932, when the rule of law prevailed and all parties were free to state their case. The Nazis got a somewhat higher proportion, about 44 per cent, of the votes cast in the election of March 4, 1933. This made it possible for Hitler to come into power with a small parliamentary majority, since the German Nationalists, who were then in alliance with the Nazis, polled enough votes to insure this result.
This election, however, could not be considered free. Terror was already at work. The Communists had been made scapegoats for the burning of the Reichstag building. Nazi Brown Shirts were beating and intimidating political opponents. Once Hitler had clamped down his dictatorship, there is no means of determining how many Germans professed to support him out of enthusiasm, how many because it was distinctly safer not to be marked down as disaffected.
The idea that all, or a great majority of, Germans were lusting for war is not borne out by objective study of the facts. Up to the outbreak of World War II Hitler persisted in publicly professing his devotion to peace. His favorite pose was that of the veteran soldier who knew the horrors