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Both Italy and Germany were industrial capitalist societies, in which production was for the market and the majority worked in someone else’s factory or on someone else’s land. Both were European societies. Each saw itself as marginal within Europe. Italy was, in Mussolini’s phrase, a ‘proletarian nation’, unfairly deprived of the general European right to occupy the poorer countries of Asia and Africa. Part of the fascist mission was to overcome the likes of Britain and France.²⁴ Hitler had much the same idea of Germany, complaining that the Treaty of Versailles had prevented his country from taking its place among the great powers.²⁵ If it is right that Italy and Germany were underdeveloped (and this is something which should not be accepted without question), it is reasonable to ask whether these failings can be blamed for those countries’ later adoption of fascism.

One of the first attempts to use underdevelopment to explain the rise of fascism was made by a writer who is discussed in several later chapter of this book, the Italian Communist writer and parliamentarian Antonio Gramsci, who was born in Sardinia in the Italian south and died in captivity in 1937 after ten years of imprisonment at the hands of Mussolini. In April 1921, for example, he wrote that ‘fascism is the name for the profound decomposition of Italian society … [it can] be explained only with reference to the low level of culture which the Italian nation has reached in sixty years of unitary administration’.²⁶

In the 30 years after 1945, the idea of a German special path (Sonderweg) or deviation from the rest of Europe, was (in the words of one historian, Heinrich August Winkler) ‘the national master narrative’ of West Germany. As developed by historians including George Mosse, Fritz Stern and Ralf Dahrendorf, the idea was that the Western democracies had liberated themselves from their feudal pasts by means of social revolutions: Holland in 1588, England in 1649 and France in 1789. In Germany, by contrast, a pre-industrial elite – the Prussian Junkers – remained dominant well into the twentieth century. It was the political representatives of that class, Franz von Papen and Paul von Hindenburg, who played the key roles in appointing Hitler chancellor of Germany.²⁷

Other examples of underdevelopment theories of fascism could also be given. For example, the former serial contributor to British fascist journals,²⁸ and later professor of political science at Berkeley, A. James Gregor, has sought to place fascism within a category of nationalist regimes that came about through what he terms ‘revolution in an economically less developed environment’, and sought to catch up with richer countries elsewhere, making fascism a European counterpart to the politics of Marcus Garvey, the Nation of Islam or Chairman Mao.²⁹

There has, however, always been a difficulty with Sonderweg arguments in that they contrast Italy and Germany to a ‘normal’ path of development which very few countries followed. In consequence, explanations of this sort have tended to become less popular in recent years.³⁰ Even Gramsci, as we shall see, refined several times his explanation of the processes that had made Italy vulnerable to fascism. The problems with the approach become even starker as it is applied to Germany, long one of the world’s three largest economies, and at the forefront of production in the key industries of the day: coal, iron and steel.

The interwar Marxists could see that fascism broke through in European countries aspiring to become colonial powers. As the Italian American Socialist Vincenzo Vacirca wrote, days after Hitler’s victory, ‘It was in countries – like Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland – where modern industry is taking its first uncertain steps that Fascism exploded in all its fury.’³¹

This book follows Gramsci and such post-1945 Marxists as Aimé Césaire in arguing that fascism was shaped by the prior colonial relationship of Europe with Africa and Asia. The politics of Hitler and Mussolini is often reduced to their capacity to treat racial outsiders as non-human, but the fascists were not the first people to treat their opponents in this way. On his return from revolutionary Spain, the British journalist and (briefly) enthusiast for a Marxism poised between Socialism and Communism, George Orwell, grasped this, writing in 1939:

What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Africa and Asia. It is not in Hitler’s power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial wage; it is perfectly normal in India, and we are at great pains to keep it so. One gets some idea of the real relationship of England and India when one reflects that the per capita income in England is something over £80, and in India about £7. It is quite common for an Indian coolie’s leg to be thinner than the average Englishman’s arm.³²

As fascism became an idea to be emulated, prospective military dictators all over the world chose to declare that they too were fascists. But when this happened the aspirant fascists of the developing world found to their humiliation that neither Mussolini nor Hitler were interested in them. When given a choice between loyalty to fellow right-wing ideologues and loyalty to existing colonial structures, the fascist leaders repeatedly chose the latter.³³

Fascism extended existing practices of colonial rule. Italian generals ordered the use of mustard gas against Libyan rebels in 1930. In 1923, the nomadic population of Djabal al Akhdar was forced into concentration camps in the desert and neglected so thoroughly that half of the prisoners died.³⁴ In Ethiopia following the 1935 invasion, the Italian Empire operated minutely worked-out polices of racial zoning, segregation in shops, cinemas and restaurants, the banning of mixed unions, and the use of criminal laws to prevent the parents of mixed-race children from providing for them. Its policies of racial segregation were more extensive than any other European power in Africa at that time.³⁵

The historian Jürgen Zimmerer writes that Hitler and the leaders of the NSDAP learned from previous instances of colonial killing, and events such as the massacre of the Hereros in German-ruled Namibia in 1904,³⁶ grasping that similar techniques might be employed in Europe. One key moment in the massacre of the Hereros was an order given by General Lothar von Trotha. He commanded his troops to fire directly on any Herero men they saw, but to shoot into the air above Herero women and children. This was not an act of kindness; the idea was to force the survivors into the desert where they would die of thirst. Trotha’s acts were well known in Germany. Hermann Göring’s father served as a colonial administrator in South West Africa; Franz Ritter von Epp participated in the genocide and was later a member of the NSDAP in the 1920s. Hitler and Himmler drew on Trotha’s commands in justifying their own killings in winter 1941.³⁷

Meanwhile in occupied eastern Europe after 1939, the Nazis intended, in the words of one historian of international politics, Alexander Anievas, ‘to telescope over the course of a few decades the territorial imperialisms other European countries had pursued over the previous three centuries’.³⁸ The Nazis treated the Slavs as an inferior race, entitling them to destroy existing settlements and tear up forms of land use as if the east was a land without people, and finally commenced in the Holocaust a system of industrialised mass killing which went further even than the history of colonial massacres on which it drew.