in 1933–6, who attempted to build an illegal mass organisation with the aim of overthrowing Hitler through insurrection. In large factories and in solid working-class areas, acts of resistance, including leafleting and slogan-painting, continued through the Nazi period. The category of resistance would also include the White Rose group, active in Munich in 1942–3. These latter were students, who distributed leaflets, calling for sabotage and passive resistance. The same spirit of resistance could be seen even in the concentration camps, in the revolts of the prisoners who disarmed the jailors at Flossenbürg in May 1944 and Mauthausen in January 1945. It could be seen in Treblinka in August 1943, with an escape in which 300 prisoners killed eleven Schutzstaffel (SS) men and fled, with dozens of the participants retaining their freedom and surviving the war. It was visible two months later at Sobibor when 750 prisoners rose up and fought their guards. It could be seen even in Auschwitz in October 1944, when 450 Jews set fire to one of the crematoria, succeeded in cutting through the fences in which they were trapped and reaching the outside of the camp before being killed.101
Then, there was opposition, often partial or limited, but still conscious and openly hostile to at least the decisions taken by the regime. This category included individual workers, who attempted to break the fuses in their factories, who disabled transformers or who sabotaged wartime production. This kind of protest also included groups like the Edelweiss Pirates,102 many of whom came from working-class or Communist backgrounds, and who attacked and fought members of the Hitler Youth. As the war effort stagnated, some German conservatives took part in acts of resistance, including the Stauffenberg Bomb Plot of July 1944, when senior military figures who had played a full part in the war regime grasped that Hitler was leading Germany to defeat and determined to kill him.103
Finally, there was dissent: softer expressions of disagreement. Several million Germans took part in forms of protest of this nature, from withholding children from the Hitler Youth, to declining to give to collections, listening to enemy radio broadcasts or ignoring the ban on contact with prisoners of war.104
Similar dynamics can be listed in Italy, although there resistance began earlier, went far deeper and in 1943 benefited from a crisis in the ruling group which enabled resistance to emerge on a mass scale.105
The Holocaust
The Italian fascist regime was slow to adopt anti-Semitism: Jews could join the PNF, and there were individual Jews among Mussolini’s friends and confidants. The highest-profile Jewish fascists were Guido Jung, Mussolini’s minister of finance between 1932 and 1935, and Margherita Sarfatti, who was an early biographer of Mussolini, and his lover. Both Jung and Sarfatti converted to Christianity after Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship became established.106 As late as December 1934, at the Montreux conference referred to earlier, the Italian fascists argued for their sister parties to adopt a racial theory of history without anti-Semitism.107 By this point, attacks on Jews had already begun in the Italian fascist press. While there were some supporters of the regime who spoke out against anti-Semitism, there were also an increasing number of prominent fascists calling for the harmonisation of Italian and German fascism by adopting the politics of the latter, including Roberto Farinacci, who had previously been general secretary of the PNF and was still a member of the Fascist Grand Council, and Julius Evola, later a prominent figure in attempts to revive the postwar far right.108 The state adopted Nazi-style race policies, beginning with a Manifesto of the Racial Scientists and culminating in a series of laws drafted by Mussolini and adopted in autumn 1938.109 These revoked the Italian citizenship of any Jews who had acquired it since 1919, prohibited marriages between Italians and foreigners and separated Jews and gentiles in schools and universities.110
Moreover, the fact that there was little official anti-Semitism before 1938 does not mean to say that Italy was free of racism. The war in Ethiopia from October 1935 was defended in racist terms – the Ethiopians were incapable of ruling themselves. The war was also conducted in a racist way: because the fascist state considered that the indigenous people were less than human, it butchered them with poison gas, like animals.111 In Italian fascist thinking, the purpose of fascism was to mobilise the people for racial war. This is how the publication Partito e Impere described the role of the party in 1938: ‘Never to allow the Italian people to rest, to urge them on, to foster among them the urge to expand indefinitely in order to survive, to instil in them a sense of superiority of our race over the blacks ... In short, we must try to give the Italian people an imperialist and racist mentality.’112
An earlier section of this chapter described how both the Italian and the German regimes became radicalised as a result of the interactions between each other. The adoption of anti-Semitism by Italian fascism is one of the clearest examples of this process. In July 1938, as the alliance with Germany deepened, fascist Italy adopted a Racial Manifesto. On 9 November 1938, Nazi activists set homes and synagogues on fire and killed more than a thousand Jews, in the Night of Crystal (Kristallnacht). Italy’s race laws were introduced the very next day.
From September 1943, Italy was divided in two, with the south controlled by the Allies and the north occupied by Germany. On the German annexation of the north, the Nazis permitted Mussolini’s remaining supporters to establish an ‘Italian Social Republic’, the simulacrum of an extreme radical-revolutionary form of fascism, but in reality a German puppet regime, while Mussolini himself was kept at Lake Garda under house arrest.113 The Nazis and their Italian allies hunted actively for Jews, who were deported to camps including Auschwitz. Between 8,500 and 15,000 Italian Jews died in the Holocaust.
The Nazis used the methods of industrial killing, systematically murdering their victims in factories of death which replicated the structures of everyday life under capitalism.114 Although many historians have attempted to understand the murders, there is no single, accepted answer that explains why it took place. Often the debate has focused on the question of whether the Holocaust should be seen as a definite regime policy, or as a response to events.115
So, for ‘intentionalist’ historians, such as Klaus Hildebrand, Lucy Dawidowicz, and more recently Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler was an extreme anti-Semite who had long threatened violence against the Jews. As early as September 1919 he demanded the removal of Jews from Germany, and by 1920 he was speaking of their annihilation. If there is no single order in which the Holocaust was begun, this was because the leader of the Nazis was obsessed with secrecy and all public discussion of the topic was prohibited. As SS Commander Heinrich Himmler said, in a 1943 speech, the genocide of the Jews was an ‘unwritten, never-to-be-written page of glory in our history’. Yet such secrecy should not be taken as a lack of planning, for vast numbers of people and untold resources were employed in the Holocaust. It was the same plan Hitler had been preparing for years.116
For ‘functionalist’ historians, by contrast, such as Hans Mommsen or Martin Broszat, the Holocaust was an improvised reaction to the events of the Second World War, the product of the failure of previous Nazi policies, including abandoned proposals for the deportation of Germany’s Jews, and the product of competing forces within the German state. As Broszat puts it:
The more the organisational jungle of the National Socialist regime spread out the less chance there was of restoring any rationally organised and consistent policy-making and governmental process. The mushrooming of institutions, special powers and specific legal arrangements, which caused an increasingly bitter struggle for protection and favour as well as a steeper decline in rational policy-making and allocation of responsibilities, led to the establishment in each case of different techniques of organisation and this, in turn, contributed to a speeding up of the ‘movement’ and a radicalisation of measures.117
In this model, the way in which decisions were made was critical to their outcomes. The institutional chaos of the German state led not, as might be expected, to inertia but to violence. Junior officials improvised a policy of mass killing, which was then taken up and radicalised by the leaders of the NSDAP.118
The trend in recent years has been for historians to accept a partial version of the functionalist theory.119 But whichever approach