The Nazi Dictatorship ; The Holocaust

The term totalitarianism appeared in 1923, coined by Giovanni Amendola, as a description of the Fascist regime in Italy. The term extended in 1933 to the German National Socialism, after the Nazi seizure of power. For Schulze, seizure of power is equal to eliminating competitors and gaining control over the instruments of governmental authority, which is based on the bureaucracy and the military. Hannah Arendt wrote extensively on totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which remains a work of reference in the study of non-democratic regimes. Fascism spread from Italy to Central and Eastern European countries with the exception of the Czech part of Czechoslovakia. Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization. Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited and obtainable goals.[footnoteRef:1] [1: Hannah ARENDT, The origins of Totalitarianism, The World Publishing Company, Cleveland 2 Ohio, 1958]

Characteristic for the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 is that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of European nation-states and their party system in particular.Another approach on totalitarian regimes is that of Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski in their work from 1956, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, who define totalitarianism as a six-point syndrome. According to them, the six central features of totalitarian systems are:1. An all-encompassing ideology2. A single mass party, usually led by one man a dictator3. Application of random, mass terror4. Monopoly control over the media, over all information present and past5. Monopoly of arms6. Central control of economyHowever, the German political scientist and historian Karl Dietrich Bracher, who studied how liberal democracy decayed into totalitarian dictatorship, criticizes this model as being static and argues that the core principle that differentiates totalitarian regimes from authoritarian regimes is revolutionary dynamic. In his view, totalitarianism means total claim to rule, the leadership principle, the exclusive ideology, the fiction of identity of rulers and ruled and furthermore, he promotes a basic distinction between an open and a closed understanding of politics. Bracher claims that Hitler was the centerpiece of the Nazi dictatorship and the rejection of totalitarianism as a concept and viewing Nazism just as a variant of Fascism is a mistake, an underestimation just as big as the underestimation of Hitler by his contemporaries.The purpose of this essay is to check whether the six-point syndrome can be applied to the Nazi dictatorship between 1933 and 1945.I. IdeologyAn ideology is a coherent description of the world, it has a scientific dimension, it is final and it is omnipresent, in all aspects and levels of life. As stated by Hannah Arendt, ideologies have only reached their true potential in the 20th century and the term ideology suggests that an idea could become the subject matter of a science[footnoteRef:2], but actually it is the logic of an idea[footnoteRef:3]; it deals with the development of events that follow a certain law. For the Nazis, the central idea was race and they saw themselves as following the law of nature, along with the law of history, as they placed themselves in a historical necessity. Historical matters are explained by nature. [2: Hannah ARENDT, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd edition, Meridian Books, Cleveland, 1962, pp. 468] [3: Idem 1, pp. 469]

The first point of Friedrich and Brzezinskis model requires the existence of an official elaborate ideology, covering all vital aspects of peoples lives, which rejects the existing society and aims for a perfect future one through world conquest. We shall see that the Nazi ideology is exactly that.Along with the revolutionary socialist ideology, the Nazi ideology is an utopian one. It is an attempt at rebuilding society up to perfection, a perfection based on the Aryan race which required the extinction of the Jews (primarily) and that of other impure and inferior races such as the Roma or the Slavs. By taking pride in his ice-cold reasoning, Hitler only accepted a radical solution for the Jewish question and managed to make of this attribute the last support in a world of loneliness for the people who cannot trust one another and see no other option than to turn to his ideology and either actively embrace it or passively endure it.According to Hitler, the Germans, the purest of races (even though he was Austrian by origins, he felt that Austria was the long-lost sister of Germany and they had to be reunited and form Great Germany, a plan developed by him in prison in 1924 and thoroughly depicted in his work, Mein Kampf), must seek Lebensraum[footnoteRef:4] in Eastern Europe, a space actually which should be theirs due to their superiority. The Germans would be the masters of the inferior races, while the Jews had to be exterminated and the only way to do this was waging war. Hitler dreamed of a European New Order or a thousand-year Reich. The beginning of a new era held a certain charm, as the old order seemed to collapse due to the harsh conditions imposed to Germany after losing the First World War that led to economic and financial crisis. [4: Lebensraum = living space/ spazio vitale its Italian Fascist equivalent; one of the major ideas of Hitler and a fundamental element of Nazi ideology; it involved relocation of the population of East and Central Europe; it served as justification for various actions of the Third Reich, such as the invasions of Poland and the USSR, resettlement and evacuation and even the Holocaust]

The main reason for starting World War II was not that of avenging the humiliation suffered from the loss of the Great War or pure imperialistic desires, but that of cleansing Europe of the Jewish race and creating a Reich for the pure race, one that would have enough resources to sustain in. The Soviet Union had to be defeated, in Hitlers view, because its government was infiltrated with Jewish influence. To quote the Fuehrer himself, the purpose of war with the USSR was initiation of the final stage of battle against the mortal enemy of Jewish-Bolshevism[footnoteRef:5]. [5: Hagen SCHULZE, Germany: A New History, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 273]

The Nazis had great plans for the future: Berlin was to be rebuilt as Germania, a huge world capital city, a giant railway network was supposed to link the Urals to the West and enormous monuments to the dead were to be built all these in the midst of the Second World War.If we are to look at the Nazi ideology as a set of symbols and myths and as a language and discourse, then we should have in mind the slogan Germany Awake!, the swastika as a symbol of mythical regeneration, the racist discourse and Hitlers conviction that he was destined to lead the German people into a whole new world. The slogan Germany Awake! was one of Hitlers favorites, sometimes used with another slogan Perish Judah!, meaning that the German nation had to awake to the Jewish menace that would destroy it from within. The swastika was Hitlers gift to the Party, its symbol, along with the well-known salute Heil!. It was already associated with anti-Semitic discourse and Aryanism and it was favored by Hitler due to its ancient aura that served quite well the purpose of validating his regime. Arriving at the matter of the Fuehrer himself, one is compelled to take a detour from the issue of ideology per se and present a debatable topic: Ian Kershaw in The Nazi Dictatorship Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation discusses the centrality of Hitler or lack thereof (a sort of go with the flow) in the events of the Third Reich. Thus, we are presented with two divergent approaches: on one hand, Norman Rich considers Hitler the master of the Third Reich, while on the other hand, Hans Mommsen describes him as unwilling to take decisions, frequently uncertain, exclusively concerned with upholding his prestige and personal authority, influenced in the strongest fashion by his current entourage, in some aspects a weak dictator. Kershaws personal opinion is a more balanced one, namely that Hitler was neither a weak dictator, nor omnipotent master of the Third Reich.The ones who support the utmost importance of Hitlers personality, ideas (therefore ideology) and strength of will, view Germanys National Socialism as Hitlerism, a much disputed term; however, a common ground exists concerning the studies that focus on Hitlers person, that being the idea that the Fuehrer had a programme he followed from the 1920s up to his death. His future program was announced by his work, Mein Kampf, but few people have read it and even them did not take him seriously. This programmatic type of interpretation can be reduced to a simple equation:

Hitlers ideology = government policyThe Third Reich directed by HitlerHitler directed by his ideological obsessionsKarl Dietrich Bracher, Eberhard Jackel and Klaus Hildebrand are among those who fancy the centrality of Hitler in the development of the Third Reich. The other approach to this matter is a structuralist, functionalist and revisionist one, as it focuses on the structures of Nazi rule, the functional nature of the decision-making process and revises the overemphasis on Hitlers role as it considers him only one of the elements of the multidimensional power-structure of Nazi Germany.In this sense, Martin Broszat states that Hitlers Weltanschauung[footnoteRef:6] had a functional role and Hans Mommsen considered Hitler a propagandist. [6: Total understanding; Karl Manheim, in his non-Marxist interpretation of ideology supports the idea of a basic distinction between particular ( level of more or less conscious manipulation, even deceit) and total (it refers to what he calls the mind of an era or of a group) understanding of ideology Karl MANHEIM, Ideology and Utopia, 1929]

Speaking of propaganda (the deliberate attempt to convince in regards to political ideologies and gain political influence), the Nazis came to the conclusion that propaganda is all about the communication of images and symbols and the exploitation of emotions. The propagandization of leisure accompanied the Nazification of education, which of course offered the main means of reaching young minds. From early years, anti-Semitic themes were introduced into the imagery and the texts of school textbooks. The great events of the Nazi calendar, such as the Munich Putsch, were introduced into the teaching of history. Biology lessons and textbooks offered endless scope for indoctrination with Nazi ideas about race. Religious instruction was downgraded.The Nazi regime was highly successful in winning supporters, as it presented a certain fascination and appealed to all categories. The blue collar workers were given jobs, benefits and recreation departments; the retail merchants were lured by the fact that their competition was subject to higher taxation; members of the skilled trades, farmers, industrialists, all of them were favored by various policies. Staging political events, celebrations of the grandeur of the nation and appeals to tradition made Hitlers regime very popular. II. A single mass party led by a dictatorIn March 1918, approaching the end of the First World War, at Bremen, emerged the Committee For a Just German Peace. In the aftermath of the war, this Committee has transformed into a party, under the name of the German Workers Party and in 1921 it took the name of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). In July 1919, at a party meeting, one of those present stands out due to his strong critics towards the Bavarian separatism. He was awarded the Iron Cross First Class for personal cold-blooded bravery and continuous readiness to sacrifice himself during the Great War, by his Jewish battalion commander. The man is invited to join the party and shortly after, he becomes a member of the Leading Committee. His name was Adolf Hitler. In 1923 he is recognized as leader by all of the extreme right wing organizations. The events were without doubt favorable to Hitler, and he knew how to remove his enemies.In 1919, the Workers Party had approximately 60 members, and in the next year the party reached 3000 members. Hitlers dynamism and ability enabled his party to absorb other groups. The coup dtat from 1923 fails and Hitler is arrested. In that period he and his party thought that they are closer to success but they were far away from that. Hitler was condemned to five years in prison and the National-Socialist Party was dissolved. But Hitler is released after less than a year and on February 27, 1925 the National-Socialist Party is re-founded. Hitlers return coincides with the years of the economic crisis which was announced since 1927 and which began in 1929.We can demonstrate that the period of relative equilibrium and economic growth between 1924 and 1928 was not so good for Nazis. The economic crisis favored them massively and the biggest score was 37,4 %. After some months, they drop a little with a 33,1% score in elections, but they already reached their limits, having a percentage bigger than socialists and communists together. Below we have the percentage of votes won by the Nazis in the legislative elections from 1924 to 1933:May 1924 6,5 %December 1924 3 %May 1928 2,6 %September 1930 18,3 %July 1932 37,4 %November 1932 33,1 %March 1933 43,9 %[footnoteRef:7] [7: Richard J. EVANS, The Third Reich, 3 vol., London, 2003-2008, pp.528]

After several attempts of Hindenburg to form a government without the National Socialists, he finally made Hitler the Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Democracy helped Hitler a lot; without universal suffrage and large political liberties, the Nazis wouldnt have come to power. The fact that Hitler didnt have a majority in Germany until he became the master of the Reich still remains and the elections from March 1933 are significant: 43,9 % , less than a half, in conditions of intimidation, even terror against the political enemies.The fixed ideas of Hitler, from Mein Kampf (1925-1926) meant the extinguishing of Jews and the expansion of Germany closer to the East, through the destruction of Russia. The racism and anti-Semitism, the core of Nazis ideology, were considered as counterproductive as electoral themes. Nothing more true. From 1920 to 1930, through successive adds, the program was changed step by step. In 1920, when the revolutionary fever ended, the program was socializing. When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, the expansionism and imperialism problems won priority. In the creation of the quasi-unanimously facade around the Nazi project, the annihilation of the opposition was important as well. The political leaders or leaders of opinion, socialists, liberals, communists, Jews, were sent to prison, concentration camps or exile.A more theoretical than historical approach is made by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski. They said that the whole idea of a totalitarian dictatorship rests on the claim that the power of decision is completely concentrated in a single leader. Legislative bodies are there to acclaim decision made by the leader. Crucially to the role of the party is to provide a following for the dictator with which he can identify. The party is bureaucratic and intertwined with, or superior to the state bureaucracy, with party loyalty being the main criterion for promotion, position and authority within the bureaucratic hierarchy. The totalitarian party is elitist, undemocratic, more like a club or exclusive brotherhood. There is no open recruitment and membership would not be allowed to exceed 10 per cent of the population. The discipline required within the party Friedrich and Brzezinski relate to both the ideology and the infallible leadership, which leads through science or intuition towards the utopian apocalypse. Power is entirely centralized and the party is the hub of a wider movement aimed particularly at the recruitment of future members. Youth movements, such as the Hitler Youth[footnoteRef:8], are set up for the purposes of indoctrinating the next generation of party members. [8: the National Socialist youth organization in Germany between 1926 and 1945; alongside the home and the school, it was regarded as the third source of education]

The Nazis do fulfill the second criterion of the six-point syndrome as well; the last multiparty elections in Germany are those of March 1933. Shortly after, the government is given the right to decree laws without the participation of the Reichstag. The opposition is eliminated, either killed or sent to concentration camps. By mid-1933 only one party remains in Germany; a party-state. The party also takes control over the bureaucratic apparatus. III. Application of random, mass terrorHitler cleared the ground from the very beginning of his reign. After almost a month of his election as chancellor, on February 27, 1933, the Reichstag burned in flames, a sign of what was to come. Not that Hitler was much of a fan of Parliamentary sessions anyway. The communists were blamed for the fire and Hitler urged Hindenburg to ensue the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, which suspended the civil liberties guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution and allowed Hitler to get rid of the opposition, within a legal framework. The same SA that was used to hunt down the communists also removed the Social Democratic Party from the Reichstag. When the SA and its chief of staff, Ernst Rhm became a problem, Hitler decided that the Reichswehr [footnoteRef:9] was more important and allowed the army to eliminate the storm troopers, along with Rhm ( a real soldier, with war experience, but who tried to transform the Nazi regime into a military dictatorship, a goal not desired by Hitler )and other opponents of Hitler. The event came to be known as the Rhm Putsch of June 30, 1934. The ones within the Nazi Party that regarded the paramilitary troops as an illegal enlargement of the army, which was limited by the Peace Treaty of Versailles, had to go away. In Rhms place Hitler chose Himmler, a man who lacked knowledge in military matters, but who would reorganize the SS in a way favored by the Fuehrer. [9: Official name for the military forces of Germany between 1919 and 1935, when it was renamed Wehrmacht]

The instruments of terror and repression the Nazi elite formations were primarily inner-party organizations, used for arbitrary violence and murder. These formations were constantly changing and evolving, adding new branches or merging with ones that already existed. The Secret State Police, the Gestapo, founded and headed by Hermann Goering in Prussia in 1933, soon came under the influence of Heinrich Himmler, who already directed the SS and who had gained control of the political police departments in other parts of the Reich. In April 1936 he also controlled the Gestapo de jure, and, later that year, merged it with the Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Investigation Police) under the new name of Sicherheitspolizei (abbreviated Sipo, for Security Police). Three years later, the Sipo was joined with the Sicherheitsdienst (abbreviated SD, for Security Service), an intelligence branch of the military, the new institution then called the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, Reich Security Central Office) and commanded by Reinhard Heydrich up to the time of his assassination in late May 1942. Recruited from professional police officers, the Gestapo had the official task of investigating and combating all tendencies said to be dangerous to the state. To implement its goals the Gestapo relied heavily on a measure called Schutzhaftbefehl (protective custody order), by which they imprisoned people without judicial proceedings, most often in concentration camps, where the prisoners were tortured or murdered. In February 1936 a new legal basis for the Gestapo came into force which declared that such actions were not restricted by judicial review. Beyond the elimination of political opponents, the primary target groups of intimidation and persecution were Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. During World War II the Gestapo played an important role in exerting terror in the countries occupied by the Nazis; especially as part of the Einsatzgruppen of the SS, its members participated in the huge-scale maltreatment and killings of Jews, gypsies, communists, and partisans. The Gestapo was deeply implicated in the attempted extermination of European Jewry, forcing the Jews into ghettos and arresting them to be deported to the extermination camps. As the prospect of defeat loomed ever larger, members of the Gestapo even intensified their murderous activities from the autumn of 1944 in many parts of Germany, and went over to murdering foreign laborers, killing prisoners of war as well as Wehrmacht deserters, and lynching Allied pilots shot down over Germany. At the Nuremberg Trials the entire organization was indicted and convicted of crimes against humanity.The previous-discussed SA (Sturmabteilung) or the storm troopers, was the first Nazi formation that was supposed to be more militant than the Party itself. It emerged in 1922 and had the official role to protect the Nazi meetings. They were also known as the Brownshirts. The SA provoked bloody clashes with the leftist worker parties and, after 1933, established the first concentration camps in which political opponents were tortured and murdered. The SA is also primarily involved in the boycott of Jewish merchants of April 1, 1933 and the Reichkristallnacht[footnoteRef:10] of November 9, 1938. [10: The night of shattered glass; a series of attacks against the Jewish population of Germany and Austria; some were killed and approximately 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps]

The SS (Schutzstaffel) at first appeared as an elite formation of the SA, in 1926, with the official purpose of protecting the Nazi leaders; it was the embodiment of the ideology and practice of its master-race worldview. In 1929 it was separated from the SA and put under Himmlers command. Members of the SS swore unquestioning loyalty to Hitler (My honor is loyalty). They were selected according to their height (above 6 feet) and had to submit an Ariernachweis (proof of Aryan descent), including an account of their ancestry back to the year 1750. It was Himmlers aim to give the SS the character of an elite community similar to an order. In 1931 he decreed that every SS member had to ask for a marriage allowance; by controlling the intimate partnerships of Hitlers elite he aimed at the creation of a German Nordic kinship group free of hereditary illness. The mentality of the SS was characterized by blind idealism toward its leadership, drastic discipline, loyalty and by the exercise of brutal and merciless force against those classified as racially inferior. Himmler further developed the SS: the Shock Troops and the Death Units (the guard units of the concentration camps), which later merged to form the Armed SS ( Waffen SS) special unit of the SS at the disposal of the Fuehrer, the Security Service ( the ideological intelligence service of the Party and its executive arm for the negative population policy) and the Office for Questions of Race and Resettlement, all part of the General SS, which was supposed to safeguard the National Socialist idea and protect the members of all special SS cadres from becoming detached from the movement itself. Therefore, the secret police and adjacent units support and in the same time supervise the party. Physical and psychological terror is used, in a close connection with propaganda (as a means of disseminating ideology), carried out through the media which in its turn is under the control of the regime. These features are intertwined and strengthen each other, while weakening the population and most importantly, the opposition. The ones who were declared enemies for the regime stood no chance against these formations. Liberal, democratic, socialist intellectuals, artists, professors and faculty members were persecuted, taken to concentration camps, resettled and their works were burned as they were un-German. All the cultural life was distorted and it was only useful as long as it served the Nazi regime.The persecution of the Jews was one of the Nazis ultimate ideological goals. The laws imposed by the regime became increasingly harsher. The Law for Restoration of the Professional Civil Service dismissed the Jewish officials and replaced them with Nazis; on May 21, 1935, the Defense Law excluded Jews from military service and on September 15, 1935 the Nurnberg Laws made proof of Aryan descent a prerequisite for exercising the rights of citizens or holding elective office, deprived Jews of full citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews. Ethnic cleansing and concentration camps are probably the most striking features of the Nazi regime. During WWII, the Gestapo and the Security Service disregarded international law and attacked civilians, mainly Jews and gypsies. The Polish upper classes were systematically killed and millions of Jews were deported. Soviet officials were killed by the Wehrmacht, with the support of the Security Service.According to Eberhard Jackel, an internationalist historian, the entourage of Hitler was rather uncomfortable about the developing decision to mass-murder the Jews. A group of young German historians who were working with Ulrich Herbert at the University of Freiburg came with an important correction to our knowledge about the Holocaust. Herbert and his coauthors present examples from eastern Galicia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland and France to show how local initiatives led to the mass execution of Jews in late 1941 and early 1942.The pain suffered by the victims of the Holocaust is difficult to describe and many writers, artist, poets, dramatists and philosophers will forever grapple with the problem of articulating it and as far as it is concerned, the Holocaust is certainly not unique, because indescribable human suffering is forever there.To define the Holocaust, we need to compare it with other similar events. Only by comparison we can answer to the question of whether it is unprecedented and has features not found in similar events. In the Armenian genocide, arguably the closest parallel to the Holocaust, the motivation was political and chauvinistic, that is, it had a pragmatic basis. The Jemiyet (committee for Union and Progress) of Talaat and Enver and their clique, the so-called Young Turks, wanted to establish a Pan-Turkic empire stretching from Edirne, in European Turkey, to Kazakhstan, an empire dominated by Turkic-speaking people. The Armenians, an alien nation, occupied stretches of Anatolia, the heartland of Turkey. The Armenians before, during and after WW I were killed in huge numbers and their genocide served the pragmatic purposes of political expansion, acquisition of land, confiscation of riches, elimination of economic competition, and the satisfaction of chauvinistic impulses of the revolutionary core of the dominant ethnic group, impulses exacerbated by feeling of utter frustration and humiliation in a crisis-ridden and disintegrating empire. Similar examples are in the case of the Tutsis in Rwanda the dominant clique of Hutus, led by a French-educated intelligentsia in which the genocide was again a pragmatically motivated one, or in the Cambodian genocide in which were three groups of victims: ethnic Khmer, Chams and Muslims, Vietnamese living in Cambodia. Even in the case of the Roma (Gypsies) the pragmatic aspect stands out. A racist ideology demanding their complete removal in Germany, was different outside the Reich; Nazi policy toward Roma was hazy. Another reason why the Holocaust is unprecedented is its global, universal character. The other genocides were limited geographically and in the most cases the targets lived in a well defined geographic locale.A third element sets the Holocaust apart from other genocides: its intended totality. The Nazis were looking for Jews, for all Jews. Its extremeness makes it unprecedented.Novel in its extremity was the Nazi use of camp inmates against other camp inmates, a complete dehumanization. On the other hand, although the Nazis did not invent the concentration camp, they developed it in new ways probably the most extreme form of humiliation.The fourth and fifth elements which make the Holocaust so genuine are on the first hand the location of the Jews at the bottom of the hell that was the Nazi concentration camp, they were the victims of an unprecedented crime of total humiliation and fared worse than others who were victims of the same crime. And on the other hand the regime from which the Holocaust sprang is the kind of its revolution. All the revolutions before National Socialism that aimed at organizing humanity were made in the name of class, nation or religion. National Socialist rebellion against humanism, liberalism, democracy, socialism, conservatism, pacifism, and so on, was the most radical attempt at charging the world that history has recorded to date: the most novel and the most revolutionary.The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a refugee Polish-Jewish lawyer in the US, in late 1942 or early 1943. Lemkins definition is contradictory. He defines on the first hand the genocide as the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic groupgenerally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the group themselves. But in the preface of the same book he says that the practice of extermination of nations and ethnics groupsis called genocide. In conclusion he describes two distinct alternatives: the first is a radical and murderous denationalization accompanied by mass murder, which destroys the group, buy many components of it remains alive; the other alternative is that the murder of every single individual of the targeted group.The author suggests retaining the term genocide for partial murder and the term Holocaust for total destruction. Holocaust is a radicalization of genocide: a planned attempt to physically annihilate every single member of a targeted ethnic, national or racial group.The tremendous treatment applied to the Jews constitutes in present the most raised chapter in the history of the Third Reich. But the Jews were not alone, there must be eliminated those like handicapped people, homosexuals or gypsies. The ascension of Jews in the heart of Germany made from them the ideal scapegoats for the all failures since the end of the First World War to the coming at the power of Hitler. We must admit that in a first stage, the Nazism was less exterminator than communism of Lenin and Stalin. The Nazism was influenced by its own conception and impulse, in an occidental society, where, was kept a legality tradition which never existed in Russia. Before the war , the intention of Hitler was to make the life of the Jews unsupportable to make them to leave the country. They were excluded from universities, schools, public functions and step by step from all activity sectors. When one reads Nazi sources it is impossible to avoid a centrally important conclusion: that Jews were, in Nazi eyes, the central enemy, the incarnation of the Devil. The Nazis hierarchy of races were based on Christian precedents like the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors from Spain in 1492, individuals aspiring to certain important position in the Spanish kingdom had to prove their limpieza de sangre.Until the 1st September 1939, approximate 400 000 Jews left Germany, which means a half from their population. Once with the invasion of Poland and its annexation, almost 2 millions of Polish Jews enter into the borders of the Great Reich. There were scenarios like the resettlement of these Jews to the East (but before that they must conquer Russia) or further in Madagascar, a part of already defeated colonial France territory. In waiting for a solution, they were forced to stay in ghettos, in incredible miserable conditions, where many died.To the end of 1941, the defeat in front of Moscow ruined the illusion of Blitzkrieg. Germany now doesnt deny a possible unfavorable end and in these conditions they must think what to do with the almost 5 million Jews which now were inside the borders of Germany after the occupation of East Poland, Ukraine and Occidental Russia. After the Jews, in the Nazis project were Slavs, Polish or Russians.With the exception of the extermination camps, the alimentary regime was calculated in so way to permit to the prisoners to live average 9 months. We wont describe here the gas chambers, or crematorium ovens or the other terrifying instruments specific to the Nazis camps, which are good known today. Was calculated that after 1939, the whole camp system could close a million of people in the same time. An approximate number of the victims was calculated at a number between 7 and 9 millions of people.IV. Monopoly control over the media, over all information present and pastLike their Soviets counterparts, the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler regarded the press as a means of disseminating propaganda, contemptuously rejecting the liberal notion of the press popularized in the 19th century by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, according to which its was a useful arena for public debate over issues of importance to society. When Mussolini (himself an experienced and successful journalist) came to power in 1922, the press was still the only significant means of propaganda available, but by the 1930s radio broadcasting and cinema newsreels had grown in importance and were exploited with particular success by Hitlers regime. A years after the inauguration of Mussolinis rule, the government took wide powers to confiscate or close publications regarded as constituting a threat to national interests , and that measure was reinforced in 1926, when the Communist and Socialist party newspapers were closed down. The Nazi regime in Germany also took measures to convert the press into a propaganda arm. In Nazi propaganda prior to their assumption of power in 1933 and before they were able to control it, the press was regularly associated with Jewishness ; the Jewish press was an expression they were fond of. Branding the press in this way came naturally to a mentality steeped in conspiracy theories, and it offered a means of explaining why the press might be critical of themselves. The paper that acted as a direct mouthpiece for the regime was the Volkischer Beobachter , which broke new ground in becoming something close to a national daily (with circulation of more than a million by 1941) in a country that previously had only a regional press.The Italian Fascist and German Nazi leadership were among the first in the political arena to grasp the opportunities offered by new media and communication technologies for the rapid dissemination of ideas and by development of techniques of persuasion on a mass level. They not only realized that the new mass media were there to be used but they also understood how to use them. They saw that a symbolic event like the nationwide burning of books in Germany, communicated at a mass level through the medium of newspaper and magazine pictures and newsreel clips, had more impact than a hundred printed explanations of the Nazi philosophy. In other words, they understood that propaganda is all about the communication of images and symbols and the exploitation of emotion. Events like the carefully orchestrated and choreographed Nuremberg Rallies had an immediate emotional impact on those who took part, generating a sense of huge excitement in participants, a dramatic sense of being involved in an unprecedented national adventure with limitless potential under the magic leadership of the Fuehrer. If the German people believed in Nazism, it was in no small part because of the skillful manipulation to which they were subjected through newsreel, newspaper, and radio. Their propagandistic drive penetrated much further into the psyche of their citizens by the enforcement of gestures used daily, such as the Heil Hitler! greeting, which meant that the Fuehrers name was on everybodys lips many timed each day. All of this went according to plan, and the plans were those of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitlers minister for public enlightenment and propaganda. Goebbels was a man with a Ph.D. and a very powerful mind, a keen student of U.S. advertising methods.But the mass rallies, powerful though they were, represented only a part of Goebbelss propaganda expertise. He had also grasped the power of the slogan. His slogans appeared on banners, on newspaper mastheads, in pamphlets, and in graffiti all over Germany. One of the most widely propagated was the slogan Die Juden sind unser Ungluck! The Jews are our misfortune. Another of his favorite slogans was Volk ohne Raum ( A people without space) suggesting as a fact that Germany was somehow straitjacketed in her territory and was therefore justified in adopting a belligerent policy of expansionism. And always the slogans were accompanied by the omnipresent swastika.The rise of Italian Fascism and Nazism in the early 20th century coincided also with a golden age of radio. As the tool of choice for propagandists radio also dominated mass communications in the domestic sphere. The marriage of totalitarianism and radio broadcasting was an important marker of the shift from elite to mass society. Political mobilization of the masses was facilitated by their mobilization behind the new medium. State radio was to have a monopoly of audience time and attention. There were severe penalties for unauthorized listening to foreign broadcasts, access to short-wave radio was restricted, and many foreign stations were jammed. Radio played a crucial role in the prelude to war in Central Europe during the late 1930s. Initial Nazi efforts focused on German-speaking populations across European frontiers where Hitler had irredentist claims. Germanys medium-wave transmitters were ideal for broadcasting over short distances. Moreover, the message frequently fell on receptive ears. Because of their chauvinist tone, fascist external services were more successful in reaching German or Italian cultural communities abroad than at persuading foreigners. Germany therefore directed concerted broadcast campaigns at the Saar region, which was disputed with France, at Austria, at Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, and at Germans in Poland.The reason why ideology is perceived as so fundamentally important to totalitarian dictatorship stems from the role given to propaganda directed ultimately to the maintenance in power of the party controlling it. The party requires unanimity. Propaganda and education training are viewed as the means for achieving the total ideological integration of the people. Any group which disagrees must be removed. One of the most important roles of propaganda is to create stereotypes of the enemy. This use of propaganda, however, they argue, leads to the use of terror because propaganda creates what they term the vaccum. The vaccum comes to surround the leadership, rendering it out of touch with ordinary peoples views and also creating problems of effective communication inside the party hierarchy. Propaganda, they contend, leads in the end to disbelief and rumors. The absence of alternative sources of information, such as a free press, is crucial in this, because without genuine information people as a whole tend to become indifferent, whereas within the hierarchy officials become more concerned to say that they think wants to be heard rather than what may be the truth.V. Monopoly of armsAfter the Nazis took power in 1933, they immediately made use of two laws passed by the liberal Weimar Republic: a law authorizing the suspension of civil liberties [the Reichstag fire being the pretext] and the Gun Control Act of 1928.[footnoteRef:11] [11: The Darker Side of Gun Control ,Stephen P. Halbrook,Published in National Law Journal, May 24, 2004, p.39]

They searched in a massive operations for unlicensed firearms, ostensibly to repress Communists but in fact to disarm politcal opponents and Jews.The Weimar law allowed police to deny firearm ownership to any unreliable person. A Gestapo permission was introduced as obligatory in order to carry a weapon for Jews on Dec. 16, 1935 by the second commander of Gestapo. Hitler signed an amended Gun Control Act in March 1938, broadening exemptions to include Nazi party members and barring Jews from the firearms industry. Nazis spent hours searching in houses of Jews for arms, smashing furniture as Victor Klemperers diary describes. Heinrich Himmler decreed that Jews were forbidden to possess weapons and violators would be sent to a concetration camp and imprisoned for a period of up to 20 years.The German Jews were not disarmed to make their homes safer for children or to reduce crime, but to provent any defense against the repression that would later culminate in genocide. Some favor a world in which all private individuals, not just disfavored groups, are disarmed and only the military and police are armed.Hitler said in Hitlers Secret Conversations : the most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all concquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing..After the consolidation of power, the Nazis introduced a decree which authorized the government to suspend the constitutional guarantees of personal liberty, free expression of opinion, freedom of the press, and the rights to assmeble and to form associations. Secrecy of postal and telephonic communication was suspended, and the government was authorized to conduct, search and seizure operation of homes.[footnoteRef:12] It provided that whoever commits the offenses defined in the Penal Code as severe rioting or sever breach of public peace by using weapons or in conscious and intentional cooperation with an armed person...shall be sentenced to death or, if the offense wasnot previously punishable more severly, to the penitentiary for life or to the penitentiary for up to 15 years. Since the terms riot and breach of peace could be applied to a protest march by political opponents, the mere keeping or bearing of a weapon might have become a capital offense. [12: Reichsverordnung zum Schutz von Volk und Staat [Ordinance of the ReichPresident for the Protection of the People and the State], Reichsgesetzblatt 1933, I, 83, 1.]

VI. Central control of economyAs Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski said, the totalitarian dictatorships share in common a centrally directed and controlled economy. Economic success is seen as vital to political success. The authors make it quite clear, however, that their arguments are not about the outward structures of the economy but about the role of economic planning and its effects. They readily concede that the differences between the fascist type of industrial arrangement and the communist one are many and obvious. They accept that in fascist economies private enterprises are mostly formally left in place with big businessmen presiding over board meetings, whereas in the communist economies the state owns and runs industry. It is, then economic planning which Friedrich and Brzezinski argue to be crucial to totalitarian dictatorships, and it is the leader who makes the basic decision about the organization of the plan. In Nazi Germany it was that of eliminating unemployment and preparing for war. They specifically mention the five-years plans in the USSR and China and the importance of this plan and the four-year plan in Nazi Germany, begun in 1936 and taken over by Speer in 1942. They argue, however, that plans do not have to succeed when the dictator and party have control over information. As they explain, Planning in Germany never became effective due to Goerings incompetence and Hitlers lack of understanding of economic problems. They also stress central control over trade unions and the destruction of workers independent representation and control over their conditions of work and eventually conditions of life. Trade unions become the agents of governments, not the agencies of representation of workers needs.Friedrich and Brzezinski also argue that totalitarian regimes try to extend control over peasants and farmers. Arguing that agricultural production is, by its nature, unsuited to large-scale organization and control and viewing it as the Achilles heel of fascist regimes, they link Hitlers policy of living space to the drive for additional land as a way out of the difficulties involved in making the available land more productive. This ideology, they argue, reinforces the totalitarians propensity to foreign conquest.Confronted with the bourgeois "brandishing his contracts and his statistics, 2 + 2 makes...NOUGHT, the fascist barbarian replies, smashing his face in". As these words of Georges Valois, leader of Le Faisceau (French fascist movement of the 1920s) make clears interwar fascism had little time or respect for economics. Fascist denied that what happened in the economy was the motor of historical and social change; they wanted their revolution to be understood not as a fundamental change in socioeconomic relation but rather as a spiritual revolution, a transformation of consciousness, a moral regeneration of individual in a collective, national context. The agencies of the Nazi Four Year Plan Office, with the same goal of directing the economy toward autarky and rearmament, had the same private and public mix, recruiting personnel indiscriminately among Nazi party men, civil servants, armed forces officers, private industrialists, and managers to the vast cartels responsible for price controls and the allocation of labor, materials, and currency in key economic sectors.

14