Hitler's Germany

Chapter One

Fascism and the conservative tradition

Fascist ideology, constituency,
and conditions for its growth

National Socialism may be best understood as a radical and peculiarly German form of fascism, a movement and ideology that gained millions of adherents in many European countries in the era of the two world wars of the twentieth century. The term "fascism" was first used in early 1919 by the former socialist Benito Mussolini who had left the Italian Socialist Party in protest against their anti-war policy in the First World War. The name was derived from the Latin fasces, the ceremonial bundle of rods and an axe that symbolized the unity and power of the Roman Empire. Mussolini turned his National Fascist Party into a militantly nationalist organization that attacked the "weakness" of liberal democracy. Its chief target, however, was the international socialist movement reinvigorated and radicalized by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in late 1917. Movemen ... read full excerpt from Hitler's Germany ebook