National Socialism

National Socialism is classified as a variant of fascism. Yet there are plenty of dissenting voices, stressing the differences in Mussolini’s ideology and political practices from those that took hold in Germany. Many influential scholars and participants in the historical events have made these arguments. In 1943, Heinrich Himmler said: “Fascism and National Socialism are two fundamentally different things.”³ The great historian Renzo de Felice even suggested that if Italy had not joined the war, the system may have become liberalized after the fall of the Reich, becoming a classical authoritarian regime, as with Franco’s Spain.⁴ The thing was that Mussolini did become Hitler’s ally, and it is hard to imagine a leader who had spent two decades gearing up his nation for war and expansion remaining on the sidelines of a world conflict. Whatever the case, the ideological similarities (imperialism, militarism, the aim of building a total state, organic nationalism) suggest we ought to add Nazism to the grim family of fascism, even if we must add the special label of “radical fascism.”⁵

Nazism was unusual for the stress it placed on “biology”—all the other elements, even the state that was central to Mussolini as well, served a strictly supporting role to the Aryan race, especially in its allegedly pure, Germanic variety. German racism had developed rapidly even before 1914, in the form of “Volkism,” a movement of agrarian utopians who emphasized such concepts as “Germanic blood” and “living space.”⁶ In the National Socialist ideology, these ideas were intensely radicalized, along with the antisemitism that had become inextricable from Volkism. According to Hitler, every time of peace could only be a brief intermission in the eternal war of races—for the survival of the racial/national community (Volksgemeinschaft), it was necessary to expand Eastward, to conquer new lands and make the Volga “a German Mississippi.”⁷ After dominating Europe, the next years would mean preparing for a continental war with the United States…

Hitler’s followers did not call themselves Nazis, they always used the full name: National Socialists. This does not mean, however, as no few interpretations claim, that the Führer saw his movement as part of the European left wing, whom he rejected in both their liberal and their blue-collar variants. The ideas of the French Revolution were to be “wiped out,”⁸ as were the “destroyers of nations,” socialism and communism.

“Either Marxism will triumph, or the German nation will,” Hitler declared right after coming to power, his podium under a banner that read “Marxism must die.”⁹

Yet Nazism did not fit the classical right-wing standards either. With growing anxiety, the conservatives observed one part of society after another being subsumed by the regime, the social and moral canons being subverted, one by one.

As historian and Holocaust survivor John Lukacs (prop. János Lukács) has noted, Hitler was a revolutionary, though not necessarily in the economic sense of thew word.¹⁰ Many German traditionalists realized too late, however, that the words of the new leader of the Reich were more than populist rhetoric.