How Fascism Comes to Power

On the afternoon of March 23, 1933, the German parliament met not in its usual chamber, which had burned three weeks earlier, but in the Kroll Opera House across the square in Berlin. The deputies who filed in found the room lined with brownshirted men of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary, standing along the walls and in the corridors. The Communist deputies, who might have voted no, were not there at all; they were already in custody or in flight. When Adolf Hitler rose to demand passage of a law with the bland title Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich, the outcome was effectively settled before the first vote was cast. The parliament was being asked, under the eyes of an armed party militia, to vote away its own power.

It would do exactly that, by 444 votes to 94. And here is the detail that unsettles the easy story we sometimes tell about dictatorship arriving by tanks in the street: Hitler had not seized the chancellorship. He had been handed it, legally, by the elected president of the republic, less than two months before. The question this article tries to answer is how that happened, and why two movements that called themselves fascist, in Italy and in Germany, were able to convert the wreckage of one war into the machinery of another.

The Wreckage That Made Them Possible

Italian fascism and German Nazism did not appear out of nowhere, and they were not simply outbreaks of national madness. They were answers, ugly and effective ones, to a common set of shocks left by the First World War. Both movements grew in states that emerged from 1918 defeated or, in Italy's case, victorious but bitterly disappointed by the peace. Both fed on millions of demobilized veterans who returned to civilian economies that had no work for them, and who carried home both the habits of violence and a sense that the men in suits had squandered what the men in trenches had won.

The parliamentary systems of the new postwar order strained under all of this. Mass politics had arrived, with universal or near-universal suffrage and large organized parties of workers and farmers, but the old liberal parliaments had been built for a narrower, more genteel kind of politics and could not absorb the pressure. Coalition governments formed and fell. Currencies collapsed and recovered and collapsed again. Into that gap stepped movements that promised not another negotiated compromise but national rebirth, and that were willing to use their fists to deliver it. Understanding fascism begins here, with the recognition that it was a response to a real crisis, not a free-floating evil that could have appeared anywhere at any time.

What Fascism Actually Was

It is tempting to look for fascism in a founding text, the way one might define communism by reading Marx. But fascism resists that approach, because it was never primarily a doctrine. The historian Robert Paxton, in The Anatomy of Fascism (2004), argues that fascism is best understood not as a coherent body of ideas but as a mobilized mass politics of national rebirth through purification, defined behaviorally by the way its movements actually acted rather than by what they wrote down.

That word behaviorally is the key. Fascists were defined less by a creed than by a method: the cult of an infallible leader, contempt for parliamentary debate as weakness, a romance of violence and youth and national vitality, and the identification of internal enemies whose removal would supposedly restore the nation to health. Paxton sketched fascism as moving through stages, from its intellectual creation, to its taking root as a movement, to its arrival in power, to its exercise of power, and finally to radicalization once in power. The stages matter because they remind us that the murderous fascism of the late 1930s and the war years was not present, fully formed, at the start. It developed, hardened, and escalated, often faster than its own enablers expected.

Mussolini Writes the Script

The first fascist regime was Italian, and it came earlier than most people remember. Benito Mussolini, a former socialist newspaper editor, founded the Fasci di Combattimento, the combat leagues, in Milan in March 1919. The name gave the movement its label; fascio meant a bundle, an old symbol of strength through unity. Mussolini's followers, the squadristi, were organized squads of veterans and young men who took to the Italian countryside between 1920 and 1922 and broke the Italian left through systematic violence, beating socialist organizers, burning labor halls, and forcing elected councils out of office while the state mostly looked the other way.

The climax came on October 28, 1922, with the March on Rome. Tens of thousands of blackshirts converged on the capital, and the threat of a fascist takeover persuaded King Victor Emmanuel III to refuse to declare martial law and instead invite Mussolini to become prime minister. It is worth knowing how much of this was theater. The march was staged as a heroic seizure of power, but Mussolini himself did not march; he arrived in Rome by overnight train, in a sleeping car, and took office through a constitutional appointment by the king. The myth of revolutionary conquest was layered over what was, mechanically, a legal handover under the pressure of intimidation. This combination, real violence plus legal cover plus a flattering myth, would become the template that Hitler partly imitated a decade later.

Hitler Learns That Coups Fail

The young Nazi movement in Germany first tried the direct route, and it failed. On the night of November 8 and into November 9, 1923, Hitler and his followers attempted to overthrow the Bavarian government in Munich in what became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. It collapsed almost immediately; police fired on the marchers, several were killed, and Hitler was arrested and tried for treason. The lesson he drew was strategic and, for his enemies, ominous: power in Germany could not be taken by storming a building, but it might be won by working within the system and then dismantling it from inside.

While imprisoned at Landsberg, serving a sentence that turned out to be brief, Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess in 1924 and 1925. The book is rambling and often tedious, but it set out, with chilling clarity, the two ideas that would later structure German war aims: a venomous antisemitism that cast Jews as the source of national decay, and the demand for Lebensraum, living space, to be seized in the east at the expense of Slavic peoples. Italian fascism and German Nazism shared the antiparliamentary style, the leader cult, and the paramilitary violence, but here they diverged sharply. Nazi ideology was built around biological racism from the start. Mussolini's regime did not adopt antisemitic legislation until the Racial Laws of 1938, and largely under German pressure rather than from its own founding logic.

Eight Weeks From Plurality to Dictatorship

For most of the 1920s the Nazis were a fringe. In the Reichstag election of 1928 they won just 2.6 percent of the vote. What changed everything was the Great Depression, which struck Germany with particular force after 1929, throwing millions out of work and discrediting the moderate parties that presided over the misery. The Nazi vote surged. By the election of July 1932 the party had become the largest single party in Germany with 37.3 percent, a plurality but, crucially, never a majority. The Nazis never won a free, fair election outright.

What put Hitler in office was not the ballot but a backroom calculation. On January 30, 1933, the aging president, Paul von Hindenburg, a field marshal who privately despised Hitler, appointed him chancellor. The conservative politicians around Hindenburg believed they could harness Hitler's mass following while hemming him in with a cabinet in which their own people held most of the posts. They thought they could contain him inside a coalition. It was a catastrophic misjudgment, and it is one of the central cautionary lessons of the period: fascism is often let in not by its true believers alone but by establishment figures who imagine they can use it and discard it.

The dismantling that followed was astonishingly fast. On the night of February 27 and into February 28, 1933, the Reichstag building burned. A young Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested at the scene, and whatever the full truth of who set the fire, the Nazis seized on it as proof of an imminent communist uprising. The next day Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties, authorized mass arrests, and was used to round up Communist deputies and silence the opposition press just days before the election of March 5. That decree set the stage for the scene in the Kroll Opera House. The Enabling Act of March 23, 1933, granted Hitler's cabinet the power to make laws on its own for four years, in plain derogation of the Weimar constitution, and it passed only because the Communist deputies had already been excluded under the Fire Decree and the Social Democrats who remained were outnumbered and intimidated. In eight weeks, from the fire of February 28 to the Enabling Act of March 23, an electoral plurality had been converted into a legal one-party dictatorship.

From Law to Violence

Once in power, the regime radicalized, exactly as Paxton's model would predict. The persecution of German Jews moved by stages from legal discrimination toward open terror. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 stripped German Jews of Reich citizenship and prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and other Germans, encoding racial theory into the legal definition of who belonged to the nation. Then, on the night of November 9 and into November 10, 1938, came Kristallnacht, the so-called Night of Broken Glass, when coordinated mobs and SA men destroyed roughly 1,400 synagogues and some 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses across the Reich, killed dozens of people, and dragged tens of thousands of Jewish men to concentration camps. Kristallnacht marked the public crossing of a line, from discrimination written into statute books to violence organized and condoned by the state in the open street. It was a preview, though few yet grasped its full meaning, of where the logic of purification ultimately led.

Key Takeaways

Fascism in its two interwar forms, Italian and German, grew out of the same postwar wreckage of defeat, demobilization, mass unemployment, and parliaments that could not handle mass politics, yet the two regimes were not identical, since Nazism was built around biological racism from the start while Mussolini's fascism adopted antisemitic Racial Laws only in 1938 under German pressure. Fascism is best understood, following Paxton, not as a doctrine read from a single text but as a mobilized mass politics of national rebirth through purification, defined by behavior: the leader cult, the paramilitary violence of squadristi and SA, contempt for parliament, and the hunt for internal enemies. Mussolini's largely theatrical March on Rome of October 1922 secured a legal appointment under cover of intimidation and supplied a template Hitler partly imitated after his own 1923 putsch failed and convinced him to pursue power by legal means. The decisive German sequence is worth memorizing because of its speed and its legality: the Nazis never won a majority (37.3 percent in July 1932 was a plurality), Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933, in the mistaken belief that conservatives could contain him, and then the Reichstag Fire Decree of February 28 and the Enabling Act of March 23 turned that plurality into one-party dictatorship in eight weeks, before the regime radicalized further toward the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and Kristallnacht of 1938.