fascism 6 (2017) 127-162 brill.com/fasc Blueprints of Totalitarianism: How Racist Policies in Fascist Italy Inspired and Informed Nazi Germany Patrick Bernhard Department of Archeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo
[email protected] Abstract Racism, especially anti-Semitism, is typically seen as a crucial point of distinction be- tween Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Based on a range of new materials, this article shows that Nazi policies of social exclusion were inspired by Mussolini’s regime. The main thesis is that racist thought and action were intrinsic elements of both regimes and constituted a unifying element between them. The paper looks at the way the National Socialists used Fascist Italy as a foil for their own dreams of racial regenera- tion before Hitler’s rise to power. It also examines the cooperation between the two re- gimes following the 1936 Axis alliance, especially in terms of policing and the exchange of information about ‘Aryanisation’. Conceptually speaking, the article argues that the methods of cultural history are highly useful for shedding new light on Axis relations. Keywords Germany – Italy – National Socialism – Fascism – racism – cultural history – anti-Semitism – Axis collaboration Historical Strands in the Interpretation of Italian and German Racism Conventional historical wisdom has long viewed racism as a point of distinc- tion between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.1 Particularly in the decades 1 Very similar Robert S.C. Gordon, ‘Race,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, ed. Richard J.B. Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 296–316. © Bernhard, 2017 | doi 10.1163/22116257-00602001 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc License at the time of publication.