Chapter 27: Dictatorships and the Second World War

Authoritarian States

Conservative Authoritarianism and Radical Totalitarian Dictatorships

The traditional form of antidemocratic government in European history was conservative authoritarianism.
After the First World War, authoritarianism revived, especially in eastern Europe.
Some scholars use the term totalitarianism to describe these radical dictatorships, which made unprecedented “total claims” on the beliefs and behavior of their citizens.
Most historians agree that totalitarianism owed much to the experience of total war in 1914 to 1918. World War I required state governments to limit individual liberties and intervene in the economy in order to achieve one supreme objective: victory.
Communist and Fascist dictatorships shared other characteristics. Both rejected parliamentary government and liberal values.
Classical liberals sought to limit the power of the state and protect the rights of the individual.
A charismatic leader typically dominated the totalitarian state— Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany.

Communism and Fascism

Communism and fascism clearly shared a desire to revolutionize state and society.
Yet some scholars— arguing that the differences between the two systems are more important than the similarities— have moved beyond the totalitarian model.
Following Marx, Soviet Communists strove to create an international brotherhood of workers.
In the Communist utopia ruled by the revolutionary working class, economic exploitation would disappear and society would be based on radical social equality.
The Fascist vision of a new society was quite different.
Leaders who embraced fascism, such as Mussolini and Hitler, claimed that they were striving to build a new community on a national— not an international— level.
Like Communists, Fascists promised to improve the lives of ordinary workers.
Communists and Fascists differed in another crucial respect: the question of race.
Fascists embraced the doctrine of eugenics, a pseudoscience that maintained that the selective breeding of human beings could improve the general characteristics of a national population.
Adopting a radicalized view of eugenics, the Nazis maintained that the German nation had to be “purified” of groups of people deemed “unfit” by the regime.
Perhaps because both championed the overthrow of existing society, Communists and Fascists were sworn enemies.
One important set of questions explores the way dictatorial regimes generated popular consensus.

Stalin’s Soviet Union

Lenin’s harshest critics claim that he established the basic outlines of a modern totalitarian dictatorship after the Bolshevik Revolution and during the Russian civil war.
Then in 1928, as undisputed leader of the ruling Communist Party, Stalin launched the first five-year plan— the “revolution from above,” as he aptly termed it— the beginning of a radical attempt to transform Soviet society into a Communist state.

From Lenin to Stalin

By spring 1921 Lenin and the Bolsheviks had won the civil war, but they ruled a shattered and devastated land.
He repressed the Kronstadt rebels, and in March 1921 he replaced War Communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), which re-established limited economic freedom in an attempt to rebuild agriculture and industry.
The NEP was a political and economic success.
Politically, it was a necessary but temporary compromise with the Soviet Union’s overwhelming peasant majority.
In 1924, as the economy recovered and the government partially relaxed its censorship and repression, Lenin died without a chosen successor, creating an intense struggle for power in the inner circles of the Communist Party.
Stalin also won because he was better able to relate Marxist teaching to Soviet realities in the 1920s.
Stalin developed a theory of “socialism in one country” that was more appealing to the majority of party members than Trotsky’s doctrine of “permanent revolution.”
Stalin’s ascendancy had a momentous impact on the policy of the new Soviet state toward non-Russians.
In contrast to Lenin, Stalin argued for more centralized Russian control of these ethnic regions.
With cunning skill, Stalin achieved supreme power between 1922 and 1927.

The Five-Year Plans

The party congress of 1927, which ratified Stalin’s consolidation of power, marked the end of the NEP; the following year marked the beginning of the era of socialist five-year plans.
Stalin unleashed his “second revolution” for a variety of interrelated reasons. There were, first of all, ideological considerations.
Stalin and his militant supporters were deeply committed to socialism as they understood it.
The independent peasantry remained a major problem as well.
For centuries the peasants had wanted to own the land, and finally they had it.
To resolve these issues, in 1929 Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture— the forced consolidation of individual peasant farms into large, state-controlled enterprises that served as agricultural factories.
The increasingly repressive measures instituted by the state first focused on the kulaks, the class of well-off peasants who had benefited the most from the NEP.
Forced collectivization led to disaster.
Large numbers of peasants opposed to the change slaughtered their animals and burned their crops rather than turn them over to state commissars.
Collectivization in the fertile farmlands of the Ukraine was more rapid and violent than in other Soviet territories.
Collectivization was a cruel but real victory for Stalinist ideologues.
The rapid industrialization mandated by the five-year plans was more successful— indeed, quite spectacular.
A huge State Planning Commission, the “Gosplan,” was created to set production goals and control deliveries of raw and finished materials.
Steel was the idol of the Stalinist age.
The Soviet state needed heavy machinery for rapid development, and an industrial labor force was created almost overnight as peasant men and women began working in the huge steel mills built across the country.
Workers typically lived in deplorable conditions in hastily built industrial cities such as Magnitogorsk (Magnetic Mountain City) in the Ural Mountains.
The great industrialization drive of 1928 to 1937 was an awe-inspiring achievement, purchased at enormous sacrifice on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens.

Life and Culture in Soviet Society

Daily life was difficult in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The lack of housing was a particularly serious problem.
There were constant shortages of goods as well.
Because consumption was reduced to pay for investment, there was little improvement in the average standard of living in the years before World War II.
Life was by no means hopeless, however. Idealism and ideology had real appeal for many Communists and ordinary citizens, who saw themselves heroically building the world’s first socialist society while capitalism crumbled in a worldwide depression and degenerated into fascism in the West.
Communism also opened possibilities for personal advancement.
Rapid industrialization required massive numbers of skilled workers, engineers, and plant managers.
The radical transformation of Soviet society had a profound impact on women’s lives.
Marxists had traditionally believed that both capitalism and middle-class husbands exploited women, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 immediately proclaimed complete equality for women.
At the same time, women saw lasting changes in education.
The Soviets opened higher education to women, who could now enter the ranks of the betterpaid specialists in industry and science.
Alongside such advances, however, Soviet society demanded great sacrifices from women.
Culture was thoroughly politicized for propaganda and indoctrination purposes.
Party activists lectured workers in factories and peasants on collective farms, while newspapers, films, and radio broadcasts endlessly recounted socialist achievements and capitalist plot.
Stalin seldom appeared in public, but his presence was everywhere— in portraits, statues, books, and quotations from his writings.

Stalinist Terror and the Great Purges

In the mid-1930s the great offensive to build socialism and a new society culminated in ruthless police terror and a massive purging of the Communist Party.
Murderous repression picked up steam over the next two years.
It culminated in the “great purge” of 1936 to 1938, a series of spectacular public show trials in which false evidence, often gathered using torture, was used to incriminate party administrators and Red Army leaders.
Stalin’s mass purges remain baffling, for most historians believe that the victims posed no threat and were innocent of their supposed crimes.
The long-standing interpretation that puts most of the blame for the purges on Stalin has been confirmed by recent research in newly opened Soviet archives.
The purges seriously weakened the Soviet Union in economic, intellectual, and military terms.
But they left Stalin in command of a vast new state apparatus, staffed by the 1.5 million new party members enlisted to replace the purge victims.

Mussolini and Fascism in Italy

The Seizure of Power

In the early twentieth century, Italy was a liberal constitutional monarchy that recognized the civil rights of Italians.
World War I worsened the political situation.
To win support for the war effort, the Italian government had promised territorial expansion as well as social and land reform, which it could not deliver.
Into these crosscurrents of unrest and fear stepped bullying, blustering Benito Mussolini (1883–1945).
Mussolini began his political career before World War I as a Socialist Party leader and radical newspaper editor.
At first Mussolini’s program was a radical combination of nationalist and socialist demands.
As such, it competed directly with the well-organized Socialist Party and failed to get off the ground.
Mussolini and his private militia of Black Shirts grew increasingly violent.
Fascism soon became a mass movement, one which Mussolini claimed would help the little people against the established interests
Thus, after widespread violence and a threat of armed uprising, Mussolini seized power using the legal framework of the Italian constitution.

The Regime in Action

Mussolini became prime minister in 1922, but moved cautiously in his first two years in office to establish control of the government.
Mussolini may not have ordered Matteotti’s murder, but he took advantage of the resulting political crisis.
Mussolini’s Fascist Party drew support from broad sectors of the population, in large part because he was willing to compromise with the traditional elites that controlled the army, the economy, and the state.
In the Lateran Agreement of 1929, he recognized the Vatican as an independent state, and he agreed to give the church significant financial support in return for the pope’s support.
Mussolini’s government nonetheless proceeded with attempts to bring fascism to Italy.
Mussolini matched his aggressive rhetoric with military action: Italian armies invaded the African nation of Ethiopia in October 1935.
Deeply influenced by Hitler’s example, Mussolini’s government passed a series of anti-Jewish racial laws in 1938.
Though Mussolini’s repressive tactics were never as ruthless as those in Nazi Germany, his government did much to turn Italy into a totalitarian police state.

Hitler and Nazism in Germany

The Roots of National Socialism

National Socialism grew out of many complex developments, of which the most influential were nationalism and racism.
The son of an Austrian customs official, Hitler spent his childhood in small towns in Austria.
In Vienna, Hitler developed an unshakable belief in the crudest distortions of Social Darwinism, the superiority of Germanic races, and the inevitability of racial conflict.
Hitler was not alone. Racist anti-Semitism became wildly popular on the far right wing of European politics in the decades surrounding the First World War.
In late 1919 Hitler joined a tiny extremist group in Munich called the German Workers’ Party.
In addition to denouncing Jews, Marxists, and democrats, the party promised a uniquely German National Socialism that would abolish the injustices of capitalism and create a mighty “people’s community.”
In late 1923 that republic seemed on the verge of collapse, and Hitler, inspired by Mussolini’s recent victory, organized an armed uprising in Munich— the so-called Beer Hall Putsch.

Hitler’s Road to Power

At his trial, Hitler gained enormous publicity by denouncing the Weimar Republic.
He used his brief prison term to dictate his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), where he laid out his basic ideas on “racial purification” and territorial expansion that would define National Socialism.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler claimed that Germans were a “master race” that needed to defend its “pure blood” from groups he labeled “racial degenerates,” including Jews, Slavs, and others.
In the years of relative prosperity and stability between 1924 and 1929, Hitler built up the Nazi Party.
The Great Depression of 1929 brought the ascent of National Socialism.
Now Hitler promised German voters economic as well as political salvation
The breakdown of democratic government helped the Nazis seize power.
Chancellor Heinrich Brüning tried to overcome the economic crisis by cutting back government spending and ruthlessly forcing down prices and wage.
Division on the left also contributed to Nazi success.
Finally, Hitler excelled in the dirty backroom politics of the decaying Weimar Republic.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler, leader of the largest party in Germany, was appointed chancellor by President Hindenburg.

State and Society in Nazi Germany

Hitler moved rapidly and skillfully to establish an unshakable dictatorship that would pursue the Nazi program of race and space.
The façade of democratic government was soon torn asunder.
Then on March 23, 1933, the Nazis pushed through the Reichstag the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial power for four years.
The Nazis’ deceitful stress on legality, coupled with divide-andconquer techniques, disarmed the opposition until it was too late for effective resistance.
Germany became a one-party Nazi state. Elections were farces.
The new regime took over the government bureaucracy intact, installing Nazis in top positions.
Once the Nazis were firmly in command, Hitler and the party turned their attention to constructing a National Socialist society defined by national unity and racial exclusion.
Hitler then purged the Nazi Party itself of its more extremist elements.
The Nazi storm troopers (the SA), the quasi-military band of 3 million toughs in brown shirts who had fought Communists and beaten up Jews before the Nazis took power, now expected top positions in the army.
The Nazis instituted a policy it called “coordination” that forced existing institutions to conform to National Socialist ideology
Acting on its vision of racial purity, the party began a many-faceted campaign against those deemed incapable of making positive contributions to the “master race.”
From the beginning, German Jews were a special target of Nazi persecution
In late 1938 the assault on the Jews accelerated.
During a well-organized wave of violence known as Kristallnacht (or the Night of Broken Glass), Nazi gangs smashed windows and looted over 7,000 Jewishowned shops, destroyed many homes, burned down over 200 synagogues, and killed dozens of Jews.

Popular Support for National Socialism

Hitler had promised the masses economic recovery, and he delivered.
The Nazi state launched a large public works program to help pull Germany out of the depression.
The persecution of Jews brought substantial benefits to ordinary Germans as well.
As Jews were forced out of their jobs and compelled to sell their homes and businesses, Germans stepped in to take their place in a process known as Aryanization (named after the “Aryan master race” prized by the Nazis for their supposedly pure German blood).
Economic recovery was accompanied by a wave of social and cultural innovation intended to construct what Nazi propagandists called the Volksgemeinschaft— a “people’s community” for racially pure Germans.
As the economy recovered, the government proudly touted a glittering array of inexpensive and enticing people’s products.
Women played a special role in the Nazi state. Promising to “liberate women from women’s liberation,” Nazi ideologues championed a return to traditional family values
Few historians today believe that Hitler and the Nazis brought about a real social revolution, as an earlier generation of scholars thought
Not all Germans supported Hitler, however, and a number of groups actively resisted him after 1933.
But opponents of the Nazis were never unified, which helps explain their lack of success.
In 1938 and again during the war, a few high-ranking army officers, who feared the consequences of Hitler’s reckless aggression, plotted against him, but their plans were unsuccessful.

Aggression and Appeasement

The nazification of German society fulfilled only part of the Nazi agenda.
While building the “people’s community,” the regime aggressively pursued policies meant to achieve territorial expansion for the supposedly superior German race.
Any hope of a united front against Hitler quickly collapsed.
Britain adopted a policy of appeasement, granting Hitler everything he could reasonably want (and more) to avoid war.
When Hitler suddenly marched his armies into the demilitarized Rhineland in March 1936, brazenly violating the treaties of Versailles and Locarno.
At the same time, Germany and Italy intervened in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), where their military aid helped General Francisco Franco’s revolutionary Fascist movement defeat the democratically elected republican government.
In late 1937 Hitler moved forward with plans to seize Austria and Czechoslovakia as the first step in his long-contemplated drive for living space in the east.
Simultaneously, Hitler demanded that territories inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans in western Czechoslovakia—the Sudetenland—be ceded to Nazi Germany.
Chamberlain’s peace was short-lived.
In March 1939 Hitler’s armies invaded and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.
In August 1939, in an about-face that stunned the world, sworn enemies Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact that paved the road to war.
For Hitler, everything was now set.
On September 1, 1939, German armies and warplanes smashed into Poland from three sides.
Two days later, Britain and France, finally true to their word, declared war on Germany. The Second World War had begun.

The Second World War

German Victories in Europe

Using planes, tanks, and trucks in the first example of a blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” Hitler’s armies crushed Poland in four weeks.
In spring 1940 the Nazi lightning war struck again.
After occupying Denmark, Norway, and Holland, German motorized columns broke into France through southern Belgium, split the FrancoBritish forces, and trapped the entire British army on the French beaches of Dunkirk.
To prepare for an amphibious invasion of Britain, Germany sought to gain control of the air.
In the Battle of Britain, which began in July 1940, up to a thousand German planes a day attacked British airfields and key factories, dueling with British defenders high in the skies.
Hitler now allowed his lifetime obsession of creating a vast eastern European empire ruled by the master race to dictate policy.
Hitler, the Nazi leadership, and the loyal German army were positioned to greatly accelerate construction of their so-called New Order in Europe.

Europe Under Nazi Occupation

Hitler’s New Order was based firmly on the guiding principle of National Socialism: racial imperialism.
Occupied peoples were treated according to their place in the Nazi racial hierarchy.
All were subject to harsh policies dedicated to ethnic cleansing and the plunder of resources for the Nazi war effort. Within this New Order, the socalled Nordic peoples— the Dutch, Norwegians, and Danes— received preferential treatment, for the Germans believed them related to the Aryan master race.
In all conquered territories, the Nazis used a variety of techniques to enrich Germany and support the war effort.
In central and eastern Europe, the war and German rule were far more ruthless and deadly than in the west.
With the support of military commanders, German policemen, and bureaucrats in the occupied territories, Nazi administrators and Himmler’s elite SS corps now implemented a program of destruction and annihlation to create a “mass settlement space” for racially pure Germans.
In response to such atrocities, small but determined underground resistance groups fought back.
The German response was swift and deadly.
The Nazi army and the SS tortured captured resistance members and executed hostages in reprisal for attacks.

The Holocaust

The ultimate abomination of Nazi racism was the condemnation of all European Jews and other peoples considered racially inferior to extreme racial persecution and then annihilation in the Holocaust, a great spasm of racially inspired mass murder.
As already described, the Nazis began to use social, legal, and economic means to persecute Jews and other “undesirable” groups immediately after taking power.
The German victory over Poland in 1939 brought some 3 million Jews under Nazi control.
Jews in German-occupied territories were soon forced to move into urban districts termed “ghettos.”
The racial violence reached new extremes when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
In late 1941 Hitler and the Nazi leadership, in some still-debated combination, ordered the SS to implement the mass murder of all Jews in Europe.
The murderous attack on European Jews was the ultimate monstrosity of Nazi racism and racial imperialism.
The question remains: what inspired those who actually worked in the killing machine—the “desk murderers” .
Whatever the motivation, numerous Germans were somehow prepared to join the SS ideologues and perpetrate evergreater crimes, from mistreatment to arrest to mass murder.

Japanese Empire and the War in the Pacific

The racist war of annihilation in Europe was matched by racially inspired warfare in East Asia.
In response to political divisions and economic crisis, a Fascist government had taken control of Japan in the 1930s.
Japan soon acted on its racial-imperial ambitions.
In 1931 Japanese armies invaded and occupied Manchuria, a vast territory bordering northeastern China.
But the Co-Prosperity Sphere was a sham. Real power remained in the hands of the Japanese.
They exhibited great cruelty toward civilian populations and prisoners of war, and exploited local peoples for Japan’s wartime needs, arousing local populations against them.
Japanese expansion from 1937 to 1941 evoked a sharp response from U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, and Japan’s leaders came to believe that war with the United States was inevitable.
As the Americans mobilized for war, Japanese armies overran more European and American colonies in Southeast Asia.
A product of spiraling violence, mutual hatred, and dehumanizing racial stereotypes, the fighting intensified as the United States moved toward Japan.

The “Hinge of Fate”

While the Nazis and the Japanese built their savage empires, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union joined together in a military pact Churchill termed the Grand Alliance.
In one area of agreement, the Grand Alliance concurred on a policy of “Europe first.”
Only after Hitler was defeated would the Allies mount an all-out attack on Japan, the lesser threat.
The military resources of the Grand Alliance were awesome.
The United States harnessed its vast industrial base to wage global war and in 1943 outproduced not only Germany, Italy, and Japan, but all of the rest of the world combined.
The combined might of the Allies forced back the Nazi armies on all fronts.
Through early 1942 heavy fighting between British and Axis forces had resulted in significant German advances in North Africa.
After driving the Axis powers out of North Africa, U.S. and British forces invaded Sicily in the summer of 1943 and mainland Italy that autumn.
The spring of 1943 brought crucial Allied victories at sea and in the air.
In the first years of the war, German submarines had successfully attacked North Atlantic shipping, severely hampering the British war effort.
The German air force had never really recovered from its defeat in the Battle of Britain.
With almost unchallenged air superiority, the United States and Britain now mounted massive bombing raids on German cities to maim industrial production and break civilian morale
Great Britain and the United States had made critical advances in the western theater, but the worst German defeats came at the hands of the Red Army on the eastern front.
In summer 1943 the larger, better-equipped Soviet armies took the offensive and began to push the Germans back along the entire eastern front.

Allied Victory

The balance of power was now clearly in Allied hands, yet bitter fighting continued in Europe for almost two years.
German resistance against Hitler also failed to halt the fighting.
An unsuccessful attempt by conservative army leaders to assassinate.
On June 6, 1944, American and British forces under General Dwight Eisenhower landed on the beaches of Normandy.
The Soviets, who had been advancing steadily since July 1943, reached the outskirts of Warsaw by August 1944.
Over the next six months, the Soviets moved southward into Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.
In January 1945 the Red Army crossed Poland into Germany, and on April 26 met American forces on the Elbe River.
The war in the Pacific also drew to a close. Despite repeated U.S. victories through the summer of 1945, Japanese troops had continued to fight with enormous courage and determination.
After much discussion at the upper levels of the U.S. government, American planes dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945.
On August 14, 1945, the Japanese announced their surrender. The Second World War, which had claimed the lives of more than 50 million soldiers and civilians, was over.