A chilling, fascinating, and nearly forgotten historical figure is resurrected in this riveting work that links the fascism of the last century with the terrorism of our own. Written with vigor and extraordinary access to primary sources in several languages, "Icon of Evil" is the definitive account of the man who, during World War II, was called "the fuhrer of the Arab world" and whose ugly legacy lives on today.

With new and disturbing details, David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann show how al -Husseini ingratiated himself with his hero, Adolf Hitler, becoming, with his blond hair and blue eyes, an "honorary Aryan" while dreaming of being installed as Nazi leader of the Middle East. Al-Husseini would later recruit more than 100,000 Muslims in Europe to fight in divisions of the Waffen- SS, and obstruct negotiations with the Allies that might have allowed four thousand Jewish children to escape to Palestine. Some believe that al-Husseini even inspired Hitler to implement the Final Solution. At war's end, al-Husseini escaped indictment at Nuremberg and was harbored in France.

"Icon of Evil" chronicles al-Husseini's postwar relationships with such influential Islamic figures as the radical theoretician Sayyid Qutb and Saddam Hussein's powerful uncle General Khairallah Talfah and his crucial mentoring of the young Yasser Ararat. Finally, it provides compelling evidence that al-Husseini's actions and writings serve as inspirations today to the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations pledged to destroy Israel and the United States.

By the turn of the 1990s, Western democracy appeared destined to become the universal governmental norm. However, as we move into the new millennium there are growing signs that extremism is far from dead. In recent years, the extreme right has gathered notable support in many Western countries, such as Austria, France and Italy. Racist violence, initially aimed at 'immigrants', is on the rise, and in the US, and increasingly in Europe, the state itself has become a major target. This book considers the varying trajectories of the 'extreme right' and 'populist' parties and focuses on the problems of responses to these trends, an issue which has hitherto been neglected in academic literature.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of radical right populism in Germany. It gives an overview of historical developments of the phenomenon and its current appearance. It examines three of the main far-right organizations in Germany: the radical right populist party AfD (Alternative for Germany), Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamification of the Occident), and the Identitarian Movement. The book investigates the positions of these groups as expressed in programmes, publications, and statements of party leaders and movement activists. It explores their history, ideologies, strategies, and their main activists and representatives, as well as the overlap between the groups. The ideological positions examined include populism, nativism, authoritarianism, volkish nationalism, ethnopluralism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, antifeminism, and Euroscepticism. The analysis shows that these ideological features are sometimes strategically interlinked for effect and used to justify specific political demands such as the stronger regulation of immigration and the exclusion of Muslims. This much-needed volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers of German politics, populism, social movements, party politics, and right-wing extremism.

The increasingly vibrant political culture emerging in Lebanon and Syria in the 1930s and early 1940s is key to the understanding of local approaches towards the Nazi German regime. For many contemporary observers in Beirut and Damascus, Nazism not only posed a risk to Europe, but threatened to take root in Arab societies as well. In the first publication to reconstruct Lebanese and Syrian encounters with Nazism in the context of an evolving local political culture and to base its analysis on a comprehensive review of Arab, French and German sources, Goetz Nordbruch examines the reactions to the rise of Nazism in the countries under French mandate, spanning from fascination and endorsement to the creation of antifascist networks. Against a background of public discourses, local politics and the shifting regional and international settings, this book interprets public assessments of and contact with the Nazi regime as part of an intellectual quest for orientation in the years between the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and national independence.

Although bibliographies do exist that concern themselves with the Nazi period in Germany and the Third Reich, no one has yet attempted a complete reference source. With the publication of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Epoch there is finally, a complete, comprehensive reference source designed to identify all English-language works that relate to the Nazis and the Third Reich. Included in this bibliography are monographs, biographies, pamphlets, and journal articles, as well as more general histories of the time period. The material is subdivided by subject and organized into eighteen chapters, making this large bibliography simple to use. The chapter subjects contain a broad range of data. Included are chapters on Adolf Hitler himself, the origins of national socialism, religion and the Nazis, articles about education and academics in Germany, law and government under the Third Reich, the SS and concentration camps, everyday life in Nazi Germany, foreign policy and more. The range of data collected in this one reference location is astounding, and should provide a nearly inexhaustible starting point for those scholars and students interested in the history of one of the most controversial political parties and governments of the twentieth century.

Since the 1980s, one of the main political changes in Western Europe has been the electoral upsurge of extreme right-wing parties. However, while the electoral support of these movements has been studied extensively, their membership has largely been ignored. This book examines who joins the extreme right and why?
Drawing upon extensive research and featuring contributions from distinguished social psychologists and political scientists, this book provides the most detailed comparative study yet published of the psychology of right-wing extremist activists. Countries discussed include Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and France.

This book investigates how fascism - as an ideology and political praxis - reconfigured the ideological, political, and moral landscape of interwar Europe, generating an atmosphere of extreme 'license' that facilitated the leap into eliminationist violence. It demonstrates how fascist ideology linked the prospect of violent 'cleansing' to utopias of national/racial regeneration, thus encouraging and legitimizing targeted hatred against particular 'others'. It also shows how the diffusion and internationalization of fascism in the 1930s produced a sense of a revolutionary new beginning and created a transnational fascist 'new order' in which Nazi Germany came to occupy a potent position of authority. The book analyzes how the eliminationist initiative and precedent of Nazi Germany became a second 'license' that empowered fascist regimes across Europe to embark on their own eliminationist projects with diminished accountability. Finally, it examines how this 'license' - enhanced by the actions of fascists and the collapse of order caused by World War Two - released individuals and communities from the burden of legal and moral accountability, turning them into accomplishes in the most wide, brutal, and devastating genocidal campaign that the continent had ever experienced.

This book initiates a critical discussion on the varieties of global anti-fascism and explores the cultural, political and practical articulations of anti-fascism around the world. This volume brings together a group of leading scholars on the history of anti-fascism to provide a comprehensive analysis of anti-fascism from a transnational and global perspective and to reveal the abundance and complexity of anti-fascist ideas, movements and practices. Through a number of interlinked case studies, they examine how different forms of global anti-fascisms were embedded in various national and local contexts during the interwar period and investigate the interrelations between local articulations and the global movement. Contributions also explore the actions and impact of African, Asian, Latin American, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern anti-fascist voices that have often been ignored or rendered peripheral in international histories of anti-fascism. Aimed at a postgraduate student audience, this book will be useful for modules on the extreme right, political history, political thought, political ideologies, political parties, social movements, political regimes, global politics, world history and sociology. Chapters 5 and 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license at https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780429058356_oachapter5.pdf and https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780429058356_oachapter10.pdf

Historians of the French extreme right frequently denote the existence of a strong xenophobic and nationalist tradition dating from the 1880s, a perpetual anti-republicanism which pervaded twentieth-century political discourse. Much attention is habitually paid to the interwar era, deemed the zenith of this success, when the leagues attracted hundreds of thousands of members and enjoyed significant political acclaim. Most works on the subject speak of 'the French right' or 'French fascism', presenting compendia of figures and organizations, from the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s through the notorious Vichy regime, the authoritarian construct which emerged following the defeat to Nazi Germany in June 1940. However, historians rarely discuss the programmatic elements of extreme right-wing doctrine, which demanded the eradication of parliamentary democracy and the transformation of the nation and state according to group principles. Instead, most detail the organization and membership of various organizations, and often recount their quotidian activities as political actors within (and in opposition to) the Third Republic. This book offers a new interpretation of the extreme right in interwar French politics, focusing upon the largest and most influential such groups in 1920s and 1930s, the Faisceau and the Croix de Feu. It explores their designs for extensive political, economic, and social renewal, a project that commanded significant attention from the leadership and rank-and-file of both organizations, providing the overarching goal behind their aspiration to power. The book examines five components of these efforts: A renewal of politics and government, the establishment of a new economic order, a revaluation of gender and familial relations, the role of youth in the new socio-political construct, and the politics of exclusion inherent in every facet of Faisceau and CDF doctrine. In so doing it contributes to a historical understanding of the programmatic elements of the interwar extreme-right, while simultaneously situating its most prominent exponents within their broader historical context.

At the end of World War II, Italy's newly formed parliamentary government began spreading what historian Philip Morgan calls "the unifying myth." The Italy that appeared in their version of events is almost entirely anti-Fascist, with the heroes of the resistance movement fighting to rid their country first of Mussolini, then of their German occupiers. In truth, the situation surrounding Mussolini's removal from power, return to power, and eventual execution was far more complicated. This book presents an accurate history of Italy during the war years, rather than what Italians imagine or want their actions to have been.
Mussolini threw Italy into war so that it could share in the spoils of what he was certain would be a German victory. By 1943, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians dead, most of Italy wanted out. Over the course of a few months, King Emanuel II had Mussolini ousted from power and signed a treaty with the Allies, sending thousands of British and American forces into Italy from the south while thousands of German troops invaded her northern border. Germany succeeded in taking over northern Italy and putting Mussolini back in place, this time as a puppet of the Nazis. The resulting chaos included fighting by anti-fascist rebel groups, retributions on all sides, and mini civil wars throughout the country. When Germany finally surrendered, Italy was in complete disarray.
Morgan focuses on how common people responded to and coped with the extraordinary pressures of wartime living, and the invasion, occupation, and division of their country by warring foreign powers. His descriptions of little known events from Italy's war, as well as vivid eye-witnessreports from people who hid Jews, fought in the resistance, and killed collaborators, clearly shows how much the country suffered during this time. And it proves how crucial the experience of this period was in shaping Italy's post-war sense of nationhood and transition to democracy.

How does a city and a nation deal with a legacy of perpetrating atrocity? How are contemporary identities negotiated and shaped in the face of concrete reminders of a past that most wish they did not have? Difficult Heritage focuses on the case of Nuremberg - a city whose name is indelibly linked with Nazism - to explore these questions and their implications. Using an original in-depth research, using archival, interview and ethnographic sources, it provides not only fascinating new material and perspectives, but also more general original theorizing of the relationship between heritage, identity and material culture. The book looks at how Nuremberg has dealt with its Nazi past post-1945. It focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the city's architectural heritage, in particular, the former Nazi party rally grounds, on which the Nuremburg rallies were staged. The book draws on original sources, such as city council debates and interviews, to chart a lively picture of debate, action and inaction in relation to this site and significant others, in Nuremberg and elsewhere. In doing so, Difficult Heritage seeks to highlight changes over time in the ways in which the Nazi past has been dealt with in Germany, and the underlying cultural assumptions, motivations and sources of friction involved. Whilst referencing wider debates and giving examples of what was happening elsewhere in Germany and beyond, Difficult Heritage provides a rich in-depth account of this most fascinating of cases. It also engages in comparative reflection on developments underway elsewhere in order to contextualize what was happening in Nuremberg and to show similarities to and differences from the ways in which other 'difficult heritages' have been dealt with elsewhere. By doing so, the author offers an informed perspective on ways of dealing with difficult heritage, today and in the future, discussing innovative museological, educational and artistic practice.

Aurel Kolnai's The War against the West remains one of the most insightful analyses of Nazi thought ever written. First published in 1938 it was a revelation for many readers. Quite different in tone and approach from most other analyses of Nazism available in English, it was remarkable for the thoroughness with which it discussed the writings of Nazi thinkers and for the seriousness with which it took their views. In this edited collection published eighty years after the original book, a team of distinguished scholars reassess this classic text and also consider its continued relevance to contemporary politics. They address issues such as the comparison of Nazism and communism, anti-Semitism, British and American perceptions of the Reich before the war and the Nazi legal theory of Carl Schmitt. This book is a vital source for historians of Nazism and Fascism.

Architectural design can play a role in helping make the past present in meaningful ways when applied to preexisting buildings and places that carry notable and troubling pasts. In this comparative analysis, Rumiko Handa establishes the critical role architectural designs play in presenting difficult pasts by examining documentation centers on National Socialism in Germany. Presenting Difficult Pasts Through Architecture analyzes four centers - Cologne, Nuremberg, Berlin, and Munich - from the point of view of their shared intent to make the past present at National Socialists' perpetrator sites. Applying original frameworks, Handa considers what more architectural design could do toward meaningful representations and interpretations of difficult pasts. This book is a must-read for students, practitioners, and academics interested in how architectural design can participate in presenting the difficult pasts of historical places in meaningful ways.

Investigating the central role that theories of the visual arts and creativity played in the development of fascism in France, Mark Antliff examines the aesthetic dimension of fascist myth-making within the history of the avant-garde. Between 1909 and 1939, a surprising array of modernists were implicated in this project, including such well-known figures as the symbolist painter Maurice Denis, the architects Le Corbusier and Auguste Perret, the sculptors Charles Despiau and Aristide Maillol, the "New Vision" photographer Germaine Krull, and the fauve Maurice Vlaminck.Antliff considers three French fascists: Georges Valois, Philippe Lamour, and Thierry Maulnier, demonstrating how they appropriated the avant-garde aesthetics of cubism, futurism, surrealism, and the so-called Retour a l'Ordre ("Return to Order"), and, in one instance, even defined the "dynamism" of fascist ideology in terms of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage. For these fascists, modern art was the mythic harbinger of a regenerative revolution that would overthrow existing governmental institutions, inaugurate an anticapitalist new order, and awaken the creative and artistic potential of the fascist "new man." In formulating the nexus of fascist ideology, aesthetics, and violence, Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier drew primarily on the writings of the French political theorist Georges Sorel, whose concept of revolutionary myth proved central to fascist theories of cultural and national regeneration in France. Antliff analyzes the impact of Sorel's theory of myth on Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier. Valois created the first fascist movement in France; Lamour, a follower of Valois, established the short-lived Parti Fasciste Revolutionnaire in 1928 before founding two fascist-oriented journals; Maulnier forged a theory of fascism under the auspices of the journals Combat and Insurge.

This book posits a new theory of fascism as a radical political community of experience. The author engages with a range of thinkers both critical of and inspiring fascism including Walter Benjamin, Albert Camus, Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of political thought, fascism and Nazism.

This book examines fascist ideology in seven leaders of parties and movements in the interwar period. It makes use of the conceptual morphological approach, focused on core and adjacent concepts, as well as on the interlinkages between them. With such an approach, the book seeks to offer an innovative perspective on fascism and arrive at a conceptual configuration of fascist ideology, capable of highlighting its main concepts and combinations. Furthermore, it examines the major texts of seven leaders from Germany, Italy, the UK, Portugal, Spain, France and Romania - Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Oswald Mosley, Rolao Preto, Primo de Rivera, Marcel Deat, and Corneliu Codreanu. With the conceptual approach, the book reasserts the possibility of finding a definition of generic fascism at the same time as depicting the ideological varieties espoused by each leader. This title will be of interest to students and scholars of fascism, extremism and the far right.

The Nazi Party and the German Foreign Office explores the struggle between entrenched diplomats in the Foreign Office and Party loyalists, who presumed that with the assumption of power in 1933 total state control was theirs.

A comprehensive new historical study of the extreme right in France, from the Vichy regime to the present day. The Front National has for some years been France's third political party and the most significant extreme-right force in Europe; its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, contested the second round of the 2002 presidential election with 5.5 million votes. This wide-ranging and authoritative book examines the resurgence of right-wing extremism in France from a historical perspective, tracing the political lineage of Le Pen and the FN through key figures and movements on the French extreme right since 1940. Part 1 devotes chapters to the Vichy regime, the aftermath of the Occupation, the Poujadist movement, the Algerian War, the 'Nouvelle Droite', and extreme-right ideology and activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Part 2 analyzes the electoral rise of the FN, its evolving programme and exploitation of salient issues, the geography and sociology of its electorate, its exercise of local power, and its impact on national political culture in contemporary France. The FN, it is argued, represents both the latest manifestation of a long tradition of right-wing radicalism and a complex new phenomenon within the changing social and political dynamics of France today. This is an essential book for all readers with an interest in French and European politics and modern history.

A comprehensive new historical study of the extreme right in France, from the Vichy regime to the present day.

The Front National is France's third largest party and the most significant extreme-right force in Europe; its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, contested the second round of the 2002 presidential election with 5.5 million votes.

This book examines this resurgence of French right-wing extremism from a historical perspective, tracing the political lineage of Le Pen and the FN through key figures and movements on the French extreme right since 1940. Part 1 devotes chapters to the Vichy regime, the aftermath of the Occupation, the Poujadist movement, the Algerian War and extreme-right ideology and activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Part 2 analyzes the electoral rise of the FN, its evolving programme and exploitation of salient issues, the geography and sociology of its vote and its impact on political culture in contemporary France. The FN, it is argued, represents both the latestmanifestation of a long tradition of right-wing radicalism and a complex new phenomenon within the changing social and political dynamics of France today. This is an essential text for all readers with an interest in the future of European politics.

In this monograph, Felicity Rash examines German colonialist texts through the lens of linguistics, using multiple analytic approaches in order to contribute to the study of ideological discourse. Focusing on texts from Germany's colonial period during the Second Reich, the book describes the discourse strategies employed in a wide variety of colonialist discourses, from propagandistic and journalistic writing to autobiographical and fictional accounts of life in Germany's African colonies. The methodologies Rash employs include the Discourse Historical Approach and Cognitive Metaphor Theory, and the book aims to develop a new model for the analysis of expansionist nationalist writing. Little detailed analysis exists of the types of texts taken as primary sources, and Rash provides English translations of German quotations, in addition to drawing upon her research in former German colonies in Africa. Rash's research will be of interest to linguists, historians, Germanists, and social and political scientists, and lays the groundwork for future interdisciplinary analyses of German colonialism.

This book deals with the Second World War in Southeastern Europe from the perspective of conditions on the ground during the conflict. The focus is on the reshaping of ethnic and religious groups in wartime, on the "top-down" and "bottom-up" dynamics of mass violence, and on the local dimensions of the Holocaust. The approach breaks with the national narratives and "top-down" political and military histories that continue to be the predominant paradigms for the Second World War in this part of Europe.

Fascism remains a topic that fascinates both academic and general audiences. This is the first book to look systematically at the leaders of fascism and related movements in the inter-war era. It shows how fascist leaders came to personify their movements and why the Fuhreprinzip was applied in all fascist organizations. It also explains how fascist leadership was of a very particular kind: It was almost unlimited in political discipline and required complete subordination. The legitimacy was based on a very vague notion of 'the organic unity of the state and the people', giving the leaders competence to rule without accountability to a party organization or state bodies. Thus, we can observe in all fascist parties/movements a practical form of leadership where policies of 'split and rule' were common in absence of principles of representation and opposition feedbacks. The fascist fuhrer was the leader, the party, the ideology - and when in power: the state itself. This book was previously published as a special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions.

Although the Nordic countries have a reputation for tolerance and social democracy, they were not immune to fascism which spread across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. This book offers the first comprehensive history of anti-fascism in the Nordic Countries. Through a number of case studies on anti-fascism in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, the book makes a significant contribution to the history of contentious politics in the Nordic Countries and to our broader knowledge of European fascism and anti-fascism. The case studies concentrate on the different manifestations of resistance to fascism and Nazism in the interwar era as well as some of the postwar variants. The book will be of considerable interest to scholars of anti-fascism as well as researchers of Nordic and Scandinavian history and politics.

This book tells the dramatic story of the recruitment and training of a group of German communist exiles by the London office of the Office of Strategic Services for key spy missions into Nazi Germany during the final months of World War II. The book chronicles their stand against the rise of Hitler in 1930s that caused them to flee Germany for Czechoslovakia and then England where they resettled and awaited an opportunity to get back into the war against the Nazis. That chance would arrive in late 1944 when the OSS recruited them for these important missions which became part of the historic German Penetration Campaign. Some of the German exiles carried out successful missions that provided key military intelligence to the Allied armies advancing into Germany while others suffered untimely deaths immediately upon the dispatch of their missions that still raise troubling issues. And based on declassified East German government files, this book also reveals that notwithstanding the US military alliance with the Soviet Union, a few of the German communist exiles betrayed the trust that the OSS had placed in them by working with a secret spy network in England that enabled its agents to receive top secret mission related information and OSS sources and methods. That spy network was run by the GRU, the Red Army military intelligence service. This is the same intelligence service that has just been cited by US law enforcement officers as having hacked into computers run by the Democratic National Committee and launched a social media campaign in order to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. While the dual loyalties of the German exiles later became known to the United States military, such knowledge did not prevent it from posthumously awarding military decorations to the men who led these missions. Until that day, no German national had ever been presented with such medals for their service to the Allied armies in World War II.