Fascist Movements

In the years between World Wars I and II, there were violent fascist movements all over Europe. Nearly every country had at least one; France had six and Switzerland three. The fascist category was quite vague and included, among several competing groups, militant nationalists and veterans of World War I. Their chief antagonists, the socialists and communists, called them fascists—from Benito Mussolini's fasci di combattimento (combat squads)—but the criteria for such a label to be used were rather hazy at first. Even after nearly a decade in power, Mussolini himself was reluctant to define the faith of his movement until he allowed Giovanni Gentile, a fascist philosopher, to write his famous article on fascism for the Italian Encyclopedia Treccani in 1931. A once-prominent revolutionary socialist leader, Mussolini forged the character of his movement as he went along, seeking violent confrontations with his erstwhile party comrades and accepting the support of whatever group would back him at the time, including former enemies such as big industry, the state, and the Catholic Church. During his struggle for power, he had learned tactics from Vladimir Lenin's violent takeover of the mighty Tsarist Empire. Adolf Hitler in turn sought to imitate Mussolini's methods, and finally, scores of other European fascist movements began to imitate and curry favor with the triumphant Third Reich. Opportunism and constantly changing profiles were typical features of the early fascist movements. Their virulence and relative “purity,” however, were quickly watered down and compromised once they participated in governments. Fascist regimes usually sidelined their “old fighters” and left policy to the leadership, the army, and the bureaucracy.

The most important European fascist movements were the Italian National Fascist party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, or PNF), the National Socialist (NS) German Workers' Party (National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP), the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Romanian Iron Guard, the Belgian Rexists, and the Spanish JONS/Falange, but there were dozens of others, including many imitators of the most successful fascist movements. Some were more on the side of labor, some with employers. Some claimed to defend the church; most were stridently anti-Semitic and opposed to minorities. Imitation also characterized their use of quasi-military uniforms and ranks, their flags, and their internal organization. The larger movements developed specialized organizations, for example, for youth and women and also for quasi-military [Page 891]enforcement operations and subversion abroad. During World War II, the Third Reich armed forces even established elite Waffen-SS divisions—the SS (originally Hitler's body guard) being otherwise employed for enforcement and concentration camp guard duty. Some movements, such as the NSDAP, also strove to recruit into their ranks corporatist groups, such as the German Labour Front and professional NS associations, for example, a NS Doctors Federation, NS Farmers, and many others to which all German workers, doctors, and farmers, and so on had to belong.