"There is no better book on fascism's complex and vexed relationship with truth."--Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them In this short companion to his book From Fascism to Populism in History, world-renowned historian Federico Finchelstein explains why fascists regarded simple and often hateful lies as truth, and why so many of their followers believed the falsehoods. Throughout the history of the twentieth century, many supporters of fascist ideologies regarded political lies as truth incarnated in their leader. From Hitler to Mussolini, fascist leaders capitalized on lies as the base of their power and popular sovereignty. This history continues in the present, when lies again seem to increasingly replace empirical truth. Now that actual news is presented as "fake news" and false news becomes government policy, A Brief History of Fascist Lies urges us to remember that the current talk of "post-truth" has a long political and intellectual lineage that we cannot ignore.

"This slim volume accomplishes a remarkable feat. It provides concise, beautifully crafted essays that provide access to the best scholarship in Nazi cultural history even as they represent the current state of research by leading experts... Supplemented with illustrations and primary sources, this work would make an ideal addition to undergraduate and graduate courses on the Third Reich, sure to provoke lively discussion and further study on the arts in Nazi Germany." . German Studies Review "Huener and Nicosia's collection provides exceptional insight not only into the murky world of National Socialist cultural practices, but also into some uncomfortable areas which survived beyond 1945." . European History Quarterly Culture and the arts played a central role in the ideology and propaganda of National Socialism from the early years of the movement until the last months of the Third Reich in 1945. Hitler and his followers believed that art and culture were expressions of race, and that "Aryans" alone were capable of creating true art and preserving true German culture. This volume's essays explore these and other aspects of the arts and cultural life under National Socialism, and are authored by some of the most respected authorities in the field: Alan Steinweis, Michael Kater, Eric Rentschler, Pamela Potter, Frank Trommler, and Jonathan Petropoulos. The result is a volume that offers students and interested readers a brief but focused introduction to this important aspect of the history of Nazi Germany. Jonathan Huener is Associate Professor of History at the University of Vermont. He has written on aspects of memorial culture in postwar Germany and Poland, is author of Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945-1979, and co-editor, with Francis R. Nicosia, of Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices, Legacies and Business and Industry in Nazi Germany. Francis R. Nicosia is the Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont. He has written on German Zionism and German Middle East policy during the Weimar and Nazi periods. He is author of The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, and co-author of The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust.

Tyrant, psychopath, and implementer of a ruthless programme of racial extermination, Adolf Hitler was also the charismatic Fuhrer of millions of dedicated followers. In this major new biography, internationally acclaimed German historian Peter Longerich brings Hitler back to centre-stage in the history of Nazism, revealing a far more active and interventionist dictator than we are familiar with from recent accounts, with a flexibility of approach that often surprises. Whether it was foreign policy, war-making, terror, mass murder, cultural and religious affairs, or even mundane everyday matters, Longerich reveals how decisive a force Hitler was in the formulation of policy, sometimes right down to the smallest details, in a way which until now has not been fully appreciated. Consistently and ruthlessly destroying both the people and the power structures that stood in his way, Longerich shows how over time Hitler succeeded in forging his 'Fuhrer dictatorship' - with terrifying and almost limitless power over the German people.

Since the election of President Trump and the rise in racist and white supremacist activity, the militant antifascist movement known as antifa has become increasingly active and high profile in the United States. This book analyzes the tactics, culture, and practices of the movement through a combination of social movement studies and critical criminological perspectives. Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews with activists, this book is the first scholarly sociological analysis of contemporary antifascist activism in the United States. Drawing on social movement studies, subculture studies and critical criminology, it explains antifa's membership, their ideology, strategy, tactics and use of culture as a weapon against the far right. It provides the most detailed account of this movement and also cuts through much of the mythology and common misunderstandings about it. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in sociology, political science, anthropology, criminology, and history; however, a general audience would also be interested in the explanation of what drives antifa tactics and strategy in light of the high-profile conflicts between fascists and antifascists.

Following his third election victory in 2008, the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was the most controversial head of government in the EU. This is a cogent examination of the Berlusconi phenomenon, exploring the success and development of the new populist right-wing coalition in Italy since the collapse of the post-war party system in the early 1990s. Carlo Ruzza and Stefano Fella provide a comprehensive discussion of the three main parties of the Italian right: Berlusconi's Forza Italia, the xenophobic and regionalist populist Northern League and the post-fascist National Alliance. The book assesses the implications of this controversial right for the Italian democratic system and examines how the social and political peculiarities of Italy have allowed such political formations to emerge and enjoy repeated electoral success. Framed in a comparative perspective, the authors: explore the nature of the Italian right in the context of right-wing parties and populist phenomena elsewhere in other advanced democracies, drawing comparisons and providing broader explanations. locate the parties of the Italian right within the existing theoretical conceptions of right-wing and populist parties, utilising a multi-method approach, including a content analysis of party programmes. highlight the importance of political and discursive opportunities in explaining the success of the Italian right, and the agency role of a political leadership that has skilfully shaped and communicated an ideological package to exploit these opportunities. Providing an excellent insight into a key European nation, this work provides a thoughtful and stimulating contribution to the research on the Italian right, and its implications for democratic politics.

This book analyses the relationship between Fascist Italy and the League of Nations in the interwar years. By uncovering the traces of those Italians working in the organization, this volume investigates Fascist Italy's membership of the League, and explores the dynamics between nationalism and internationalism in Geneva. The relationship between Fascist Italy and the League of Nations was contradictory, shifting from active collaboration to open disagreement. Previous literature has not reflected this oscillation in policy, focusing disproportionally on the problems Italy caused for the League, such as the Ethiopian crisis. Yet Fascist Italy remained in the League for more than fifteen years, and was the third largest power within the institution. How did a Fascist dictatorship fit into an organization espousing principles of liberal internationalism? By using archival sources from four countries, Elisabetta Tollardo shows that Fascist Italy was much more concerned with, and involved in, the League than currently believed.

The Nazi Germany Sourcebook is an exciting new collection of documents on the origins, rise, course and consequences of National Socialism, the Third Reich, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Packed full of both official and private papers from the perspectives of perpetrators and victims, these sources offer a revealing insight into why Nazism came into being, its extraordinary popularity in the 1930s, how it affected the lives of people, and what it means to us today.
This carefully edited series of 148 documents, drawn from 1850 to 2000, covers the pre-history and aftermath of Nazism. Organised into seven chapters, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook focuses on key areas of study, helping students to understand and critically evaluate this extraordinary historical episode:
* the ideological roots of Nazism, and World War I
* the Weimar Republic
* the consolidation of Nazi power
* Hitler's motives, aims and preparation for war
* World War II
* the Holocaust
* the Cold War and recent historical debates.

Throughout the Twentieth Century, big business has been a basic institution. Large corporations have provided a fundamental contribution to the wealth of nations and, at the same time, have had a remarkable impact on the political and social systems within which they have operated. It is difficult to understand the development of the most advanced economies if we do not consider the specific evolution of big business in every national case. On the other hand, it is not possible to explain the shape and behavior of big business without considering its development as part of the history of the country in which they operate. The largest US, German, British and French firms were key actors in favoring their nations' development and, even at the end of the Twentieth Century, made a very important contribution to their growth. In many countries, a stable core of large corporations developed only relatively lately, or did not develop at all, and under these circumstances, big business was not able to significantly participate in the economic growth of such countries. Scholars who dealt with the economic history of Italy and Spain are generally unanimous in tagging these nations as industrial late-comers, ineffective in promoting big autochthonous private and State-owned firms, dominated by family companies, and characterized by a strong competitive advantage on the part of small and medium-sized enterprises. At the same time, Spanish and Italian business and economic historians have tended to say little about the role and features of big business. This book thus fills a significant gap in the work on the development of Southern European capitalism and its large corporations by analyzing the Italian and Spanish cases and comparing them with each other and with what has occurred in the United States and in the largest European nations. Examining both the macro dynamics (national but also supra national) and the micro level, utilizing samples of big corporations and going deeply into some company cases, this volume identifies some important protagonists of the Italian and Spanish economies (such as the State, families and foreign investors) and investigates a wider panorama which includes the political, economic and social relationships of the corporations, providing insights into the form of capitalism that exists in these countries.

Following his third election victory in 2008, the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was the most controversial head of government in the EU. This is a cogent examination of the Berlusconi phenomenon, exploring the success and development of the new populist right-wing coalition in Italy since the collapse of the post-war party system in the early 1990s. Carlo Ruzza and Stefano Fella provide a comprehensive discussion of the three main parties of the Italian right: Berlusconi's Forza Italia, the xenophobic and regionalist populist Northern League and the post-fascist National Alliance. The book assesses the implications of this controversial right for the Italian democratic system and examines how the social and political peculiarities of Italy have allowed such political formations to emerge and enjoy repeated electoral success. Framed in a comparative perspective, the authors: explore the nature of the Italian right in the context of right-wing parties and populist phenomena elsewhere in other advanced democracies, drawing comparisons and providing broader explanations. locate the parties of the Italian right within the existing theoretical conceptions of right-wing and populist parties, utilising a multi-method approach, including a content analysis of party programmes. highlight the importance of political and discursive opportunities in explaining the success of the Italian right, and the agency role of a political leadership that has skilfully shaped and communicated an ideological package to exploit these opportunities. Providing an excellent insight into a key European nation, this work provides a thoughtful and stimulating contribution to the research on the Italian right, and its implications for democratic politics.

In Priest, Politician, Collaborator, James Mace Ward offers the first comprehensive and scholarly English-language biography of the Catholic priest and Slovak nationalist Jozef Tiso (1887 1947). The first president of an independent Slovakia, established as a satellite of Nazi Germany, Tiso was ultimately hanged for treason and (in effect) crimes against humanity by a postwar reunified Czechoslovakia. Drawing on extensive archival research, Ward portrays Tiso as a devoutly religious man who came to privilege the maintenance of a Slovak state over all other concerns, helping thus to condemn Slovak Jewry to destruction. Ward, however, refuses to reduce Tiso to a mere opportunist, portraying him also as a man of principle and a victim of international circumstances. This potent mix, combined with an almost epic ability to deny the consequences of his own actions, ultimately led to Tiso's undoing.

Tiso began his career as a fervent priest seeking to defend the church and pursue social justice within the Kingdom of Hungary. With the breakup of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the creation of a Czechoslovak Republic, these missions then fused with a parochial Slovak nationalist agenda, a complex process that is the core narrative of the book. Ward presents the strongest case yet for Tiso's heavy responsibility in the Holocaust, crimes that he investigates as an outcome of the interplay between Tiso s lifelong pattern of collaboration and the murderous international politics of Hitler s Europe. To this day memories of Tiso divide opinion within Slovakia, burdening the country s efforts to come to terms with its own history. As portrayed in this masterful biography, Tiso s life not only illuminates the history of a small state but also supplies a missing piece of the larger puzzle that was interwar and wartime Europe."

The rarely told story of Savitri Devi-a Frenchwoman and one of Hitler's most powerful advocates In this window onto the roots and evolution of international neo-Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke reveals the powerful impact of one of fascism's most creative minds. Savitri Devi's influence on neo-Nazism and other hybrid strains of mystical fascism has been continuous since the mid-1960s. A Frenchwoman of Greek-English birth, Devi became an admirer of German National Socialism in the late 1920s. Deeply impressed by its racial heritage and caste-system, she emigrated to India, where she developed her racial ideology, in the early 1930s. Her works have been reissued and distributed through various neo-Nazi networks and she has been lionized as a foremother of Nazi ideology. Her appeal to neo-Nazi sects lies in the very eccentricity of her thought-combining Aryan supremacism and anti-Semitism with Hinduism, social Darwinism, animal rights, and a fundamentally biocentric view of life-and has resulted in curious, yet potent alliances in radical ideology. As one of the earliest Holocaust deniers and the first to suggest that Adolf Hitler was an avatar-a god come to earth in human form to restore the world to a golden age-Devi became a fixture in the shadowy neo-Nazi world. In Hitler's Priestess, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke examines how someone with so little tangible connection to Nazi Germany became such a powerful advocate of Hitler's misanthropy. Hitler's Priestess illuminates the life of a woman who achieved the status of a prophetess for her penchant for redirecting authentic religious energies in the service of regenerate fascism.

How does creativity thrive in the face of fascism? How can a highly artistic individual function professionally in so threatening a climate?

The final book in a critically acclaimed trilogy that includes Different Drummers (OUP 1992) and The Twisted Muse (OUP 1997), this is a detailed study of the often interrelated careers of eight outstanding German composers who lived and worked amid the dictatorship of the Third Reich: Werner Egk, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Carl Orff, Hans Pfitzner, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. Noted historian Michael H. Kater weighs issues of accommodation and resistance to ask whether these artists corrupted themselves in the service of a criminal regime--and if so, whether this is evident in their music. He also considers the degrees to which the Nazis politically, socially, economically, and aesthetically succeeded in their treatment of these individuals, whose lives and compositions represent diverse responses to totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism: The Basics is an easy to read introduction into the main concepts, ideologies, and regimes associated with totalitarianism. Starting with an overview of how scholars have attempted to define totalitarianism, Phillip W. Gray begins with an examination of the various types of terms used, helping the reader think about how these terms do - and do not - apply to different ideologies and governments. Easily accessible language and the use of numerous examples aids readers in seeing the connections between certain types of ideologies and some forms of organization/movements in their relation to historically well-known totalitarian regimes. Gray concludes with the tools necessary to think through how to distinguish between an actual (or potential) totalitarian system and regimes that, while oppressive or authoritarian, would not be totalitarian in nature. A rich bibliography containing additional readings bookend the text. Totalitarianism: The Basics offers an essential introduction for students from all backgrounds seeking to understand totalitarianism and for general readers with an interest in political ideologies and extremism. For those knowledgeable in this field, it adds conceptual relevance and the varieties of ways of thinking about the term.

Europe has a long history of state-led population displacement on ethnic grounds. The nationalist argument of ethnic homogeneity has been a crucial factor in the mapping of the continent. At no time has this been more the case than during and after the Second World War. Both under the aggressive expansionism of the Third Reich and after Germany's defeat, millions were brutally forced out of their homelands. Presenting a history from the top as well as the bottom, People on the Move reconstructs the complex map of forced population displacements that took place across Europe during and immediately after the Second World War.

In this fascinating account of the master social scientist and policy innovator, Gino Germani, written by his daughter, the reader will find a rich social and intellectual history. Germani's life traversed Italy under Mussolini's fascism, Argentina under Peronism, and North America during the glorious days of the social sciences' postwar expansion. With high irony, the biography concludes with Germani's return to Naples, Italy, as what Ana Germani correctly calls "an outsider in the homeland." This is a volume that should be uniquely appealing to area specialists, social psychologists, and those concerned with the cross-currents of politics and society.

From his youth in Italy, which he left as a result of persecution by the Fascist authorities, through his long and distinguished career in international social science, and a career carved out in a series of exiles, Germani maintained a unity of purpose based on a liberal world outlook in political terms and a struggle against totalitarianism. Social science was the cement that bound Germani's affirmations of democracy and his opposition to dictatorship. In Argentina, Germani is recognized as the founder of modern scientific sociology. There as elsewhere, his work was grounded on the presumption that a biometric society was the ground on which all science develops.

Living and working during one of the most fertile periods in the development of social research in Argentina, Germani was the central protagonist of its most fertile period. Argentina served as a central focal point for discussion and debate on the practices of modern societies and the cultural forms. Whether in Italy, Argentina, or the United States, German's work took seriously the individual and transpersonal events that helped form social structures of modernization. The book is rich in details, providing a full bibliography of the works of Germani, his relationships with foundations, universities and personnel, and brief profiles of individuals who worked with and knew him.

In this up-to-date, succinct, and highly readable volume, Alan E. Steinweis presents a new synthesis of the origins, development, and downfall of Nazi Germany. After tracing the intellectual and cultural origins of Nazi ideology, the book recounts the rise and eventual victory of the Nazi movement against the background of the struggling Weimar Republic. The book details the rapid transformation of Germany into a dictatorship, focusing on the interplay of Nazi violence and the readiness of Germans to accommodate themselves to the new regime. Steinweis chronicles Nazi efforts to transform German society into a so-called People's Community, imbued with hyper-nationalism, an authoritarian spirit, Nazi racial doctrine, and antisemitism. The result was less a People's Community than what Steinweis calls a People's Dictatorship - a repressive regime that acted brutally toward the targets of its persecution, its internal opponents, and its foreign enemies even as it enjoyed support across much of German society.

Helene was a strong-willed princess, raised in France but closely connected with the court of Queen Victoria. After the premature end to a romance with Victoria's grandson, she married into the royal family of Italy. However, Helene began extended adventuresome trips into Africa where she became a big-game hunter, explorer and travel writer, escaping from an unhappy marriage and the boredom of court life. Her travels took her around the world, but her sense of royal duty brought her back to nurse aboard a hospital ship in Libyan waters, then to an important role as head of the Italian Red Cross nurses during the First World War while her husband headed Italy's Third Army, and her two sons served in the artillery and the navy. Afterwards, her strong Italian nationalism made her an ally to Gabriele d'Annunzio and Benito Mussolini, but the disastrous Second World War saw her grandchildren interned in Austria and her older son die as a British prisoner-of-war while she continued her charitable work in Naples. When the country voted to become a republic in 1946, Helene was the only member of the royal family allowed to remain in Italy with her second 'secret' husband.

This is the first comprehensive critical study of the Organisation Todt (OT), a key institution which oversaw the Third Reich's vast slave labour programme together with the SS, Wehrmacht and industry. The book breaks new ground by revealing the full extent of the organisation's brutal and murderous operations across occupied Europe and in the Reich. For the first time, Charles Dick provides a strong voice for camp survivors overseen by the OT, drawing on an extensive collection of personal accounts and analysing the violence they endured. Builders of the Third Reich shows Hitler used the OT, which had a labour force of around 1.5 million people in 1944, as an instrument of subjugation and occupation to project German imperial power. Drawing on a broad range of primary sources, it demonstrates how the organisation participated in the plunder of Europe's raw materials and manpower, greatly boosting the German war economy. The book reveals how OT staff shot, beat or worked tens of thousands of prisoners to death, both within the SS-run concentration camp system and outside it, with analysis of OT operations showing that where it had sole, or very high levels of control over camps, prisoner death rates were extremely high. Examining how engineers and builders, individuals who fitted the category of 'ordinary men' as precisely as any other group so far examined by historians, perpetrated war crimes, this volume reflects on how few OT personnel were interrogated or came to trial and how the organisation passed largely under the radar of post-war prosecutors, researchers and the general public.

The essays in this volume consider the involvement of business corporations and of individual businessmen in the politics of the 1930s and 1940s: in the move away from the market and also from democracy, towards state control and authoritarianism, including the massive intervention of the state in property rights. How far did businesses attempt to guide this intervention for their own purposes, and to what extent did they succeed? This debate deals, centrally, with the role of German business, of banks, of industrial corporations, and of small tradesmen in the Nazi regime. An older discussion of how they may have facilitated the Nazi takeover has been supplemented here by an investigation into how they made the regime's policies possible, and the extent to which the profit motive drove them to participate - with sometimes more, sometimes less enthusiasm - in the politics of inhumanity. Such discussion has been given further impetus by legal action, initially in the United States, in the form of class action suits on behalf of the victims of Nazism. What do such legal and political debates mean for business history? What are the current responsibilities of business facing the consequences of historical action? And what lessons should be learned concerning the ethics of business behaviour? The contributions to this volume were originally presented as papers at a conference organised by the Society for European Business History in Paris in November 1998.

Beginning with the question of the role of the past in the shaping of a contemporary identity, this volumes spans three generations of German and Austrian writers and explores changes and shifts in the aesthetics of VergangenheitsbewAltigung (coming to terms with the past). The purpose of the book is to assess contemporary German literary representations of National Socialism in a wider context of these current debates. The contributors address questions arising from a shift over the last decade, triggered by a generation change-questions of personal and national identity in Germany and Austria, and the aesthetics of memory. One of the central questions that emerges in relation to the Hitler youth generation is that of biography, as examined through GA1/4nter Grass' and Martin Walser's conflicting views on the subject of National Socialism. Other themes explored here are the conflict between the post-war generations and the contributions of that conflict to (West)-German mentality, and the growing historical distance and its influence on the aesthetics of representation.

A meticulous analysis of fascism, its manifestations in Russian political and cultural history, and fascist tendencies and movements in contemporary Russia. The author devotes chapters to the many Russian political parties, movements, and organizations that have been labeled (or mislabeled) as fascist. He critically examines each in terms of program, leadership, and organizational effectiveness. Against the background of the current climate of opinion and events in Russia, he concludes with a careful attempt to weigh the prospects for a fascist outcome.

Volume 2 of this series of documents with commentary covers the domestic aspects of the regime between 1933 and 1939: the political stystem, the economy and society, propaganda and indoctrination, policies towards youth and women, the SS system of terror, antisemitism and popular attitudes towards the regime - consent, dissent and resistance. The documents in the four volumes of this series are drawn from a wide range of sources - official and party documents, memoirs, letters, diaries and newspapers - and are linked with a commentary. The combination of documents and commentary represents at the same time a textbook, a contribution to scholarship and a source book for students and historians.

Post-war legal scholars commonly consider the Third Reich's judicial system to be the paradigm of 'evil law'. By examining how crucial parts of this distorted normative order evolved and were justified by regime-loyal legal theorists, we can appreciate how law can bend to a political ideology and fail to keep state power from transgressing elementary standards of humanity and the rule of law. From 1933 to 1939, a flood of publications reflected on the question of how to adapt law to the political ends of National Socialism, debating both the normative and constitutional foundations of the National Socialist state, and the proper form and content of criminal and police law in this new political framework. These debates, the main threads of which are central to this book, reveal the normative ideas driving the Fuhrer state and the legal subtext to the Nazi regime's escalating atrocities.

During WW2, a group of Jewish refugees (intellectuals, writers, artists and athletes - most from Germany and Austria) escaped to Britain and were interned as ‘enemy aliens’. In 1942, they were selected and trained to form a special unit of commandoes who would be sent back into Europe to play a significant role in the final battles against the Nazis.

Based on original archival research, interviews and a cache of newly discovered sources, this is a book brimming with camaraderie, heroism and high-octane storytelling, as it tells the dramatic story of the X-Troop men who helped to defeat the Nazis and liberate the concentration camps where their families had either been killed or imprisoned.

Today the Left faces new challenges from political forces amassing on the radical right. The 52nd volume of the Socialist Register presents a serious calibration and a careful political mapping of these forces. It addresses pivotal questions on the reordering of the new right. These essays - very broad in terms of themes and places - speak to the global challenges the new right poses for the left at this historical moment. * What is the nature of the right's populism, nationalism and militarism? * What is the social base and organizational strength and range of far right political forces? * To what extent are they influencing mainstream parties and opinion? * How have they penetrated state institutions?* What role do state security services and police forces play?* Does our political situation today require comparison with 1930s Fascism? * How should the left respond to defend democratic and human rights?