Europe, Fascism & the Holocaust - HIST 337w Resource Guide

Pamphlet by the American League published in 1935 based on a lecture of John Strachey.

"Fascism" was the ideology of the movement that, under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, seized power in Italy in 1922 and held power until the Allied invasion of Italy in World War II. Mussolini was a socialist until 1915, and fascism is a paradoxical but potent mixture of extreme socialist, or syndicalist, notions with a Hegelian or idealist theory of the state.

The characteristics, values, and priorities of fascist movements were highly particular, with various combinations of policies and sometimes contradictory notions. Few scholars agree on a single description of fascism, and its very definition remains to this day the most controversial debate on the subject. Making the task even more difficult is the fact that fascist dictators, such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, often sneered at ideologies and programs, insisting that pragmatic action alone was important.

Political ideology that denies all rights to individuals in their relations with the state; specifically, the totalitarian nationalist movement founded in Italy in 1919 by Mussolini and followed by Hitler's Germany in 1933.Fascism came about essentially as a result of the economic and political crisis of the years after World War I. Units called fasci di combattimento (combat groups), from the Latin fasces, were originally established to oppose communism. The fascist party, the Partitio Nazionale Fascista, controlled Italy 1922–43. Fascism protected the existing social order by suppressing the working-class movement by force and by providing scapegoats for popular anger such as minority groups: Jews, foreigners, or blacks; it also prepared the citizenry for the economic and psychological mobilization of war.

The term National Socialism refers to a political movement and ideology born out of a series of tumultuous events in German history that culminated in the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in 1933. National Socialism, also referred to as Nazism, was at its core ultraconservative, hypernationalistic, anticapitalist, antiliberal, anticommunist, anti-Semitic, and militaristic. On the political spectrum, Nazism is generally, although not always, understood to be a variant of fascism and thus a movement of the extreme right.

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