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On the first page of On War Carl von Clausewitz quipped that ‘the maximum use of force is in no way incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect’. Beatrice Heuser might object to Clausew...

Vorspann Es unterliegt keinem Zweifel, dass italienische Diplomaten und Offiziere im besetzten Griechenland, Kroatien und Südfrankreich tausende Juden vor der Deportation in die deutschen Vernichtungslager bewahrt haben. Heftig umstritten aber sind die Motive, die sie dabei leiteten. MacGregor Knox, einer der besten Kenner der Materie, schafft hier Klarheit und zeigt, dass sich der Mythos von den „anständigen Italienern“ nicht länger aufrechterhalten lässt.

The de-legitimisation of the Italian political system that culminated in the upheavals of the late 1980s has permitted a very public re-examination of the meaning and significance of both the Fascist regime and the Resistance to it. Although debates between historians had already begun over these issues, they have been thrust into the media spotlight now that the political consensus surrounding their interpretation has collapsed. The following two articles examine both the content and conduct of these debates, and consider the extent to which they have contributed to a reassessment of the history of these periods. Naturally the opinions expressed in these articles are solely those of the authors themselves: Contemporary European History would welcome further comments and contributions concerning this rethinking of the contemporary Italian experience.

This ground-breaking and innovative book examines the influence of charisma on power, authority and nationalism. The authors both apply and challenge Max Weber’s concept of ‘charisma’ and integrate it into a broader discussion of other theoretical models. Using an interdisciplinary approach, leading international scholars draw on a diverse range of cases to analyse charisma in benign and malignant leaderships, as well as the relationship between the cult of the leader, the adulation of the masses and the extension of individual authority beyond sheer power. They discuss idiosyncratic authority and oratory, and they address how political, social and regional variations help explain concepts and policies which helped forge and reformulate nations, national identities and movements. The chapters on particular charismatic leaders cover Abraham Lincoln, Kemal Ataturk, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Gamal Nasser, Jorg Haider and Nelson Mandela.

To the Threshold of Power is the first volume of a two-part work that seeks to explain the origins and dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships. It lays a foundation for understanding the Nazi and Fascist regimes through parallel investigations of Italian and German society, institutions, and national myths; the supreme test of the First World War; and the post-1918 struggles from which the Fascist and National Socialist movements emerged. It emphasizes two principal sources of movement: the nationalist mythology of the intellectuals and the institutional culture and agendas of the two armies, especially the Imperial German Army and its Reichswehr successor. The book's climax is the cataclysm of 1914-18 and the rise and triumph of militarily organized radical nationalist movements - Mussolini's Fasci di combattimento and Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party - dedicated to the perpetuation of the war and the overthrow of the post-1918 world order.

The early Greek imagination envisaged the past and the present as in front of us – we can see them. The future, invisible, is behind us. … Paradoxical though it may sound to the modern ear, this image of our journey through time may be truer to reality than the medieval and modern feeling that we face the future as we make our way forward into it. The essays in this volume have focused on the transformations in the art of war that have marked the rise of the West. The purpose of this final chapter is entirely different. It is to draw general conclusions about the nature of military revolutions and of revolutions in military affairs, and to explore what that past might suggest about the potential for such revolutions in the future. In view of the claims of the enthusiasts that the United States is riding the crest of an American revolution in military affairs, these are intriguing questions indeed. The pace of technological and social change and the continuing antagonisms between states make it highly probable that war, military revolutions, and revolutions in military affairs will play a central role in the century that has just begun.

Fascist Italy's ultimate defeat was foreordained. It was a pygmy among giants, and Hitler's failure to destroy the Soviet Union in 1941 doomed all three Axis powers. But Italy's defeat was unique; the only asset that it conquered - briefly - with its own unaided forces in the entire Second World War was a dusty and useless corner of Africa, British Somaliland. And Italy's forces dissolved in 1943 almost without resistance, in stark contrast to the grim fight to the last cartridge of Hitler's army or the fanatical faithfulness unto death of the troops of Imperial Japan. This book tries to understand why the Italian armed forces and Fascist regime were so remarkably ineffective at an activity - war - central to their existence. It approaches the issue above all from the perspective of military culture, through analysis of the services' failure to imagine modern warfare and through a topical structure that offers a social-cultural, political, military-economic, strategic, operational, and tactical cross-section of the war effort.

The origins of the process that transmuted Prussia–Germany's most hallowed social institution and professional group, the officer corps, into a functional elite of ‘National Socialist Führer-personalities’ remain obscure. Recent studies have argued that the ‘structural pressures of modern war’ – the immense losses of summer 1942 – compelled the abolition of time-honoured educational and social qualifications for officer candidacy and the basing of promotions almost solely on battlefield prowess, and that ‘National Socialist elite manipulation’ was at best a secondary factor. Yet archival evidence makes clear that the pressures of war took second place in the army's official mind to the need to preserve order and tradition, and that it was above all Adolf Hitler who dictated the timing, shape, and extent of changes that the bureaucrats were largely incapable of imagining. ‘Führer-selection through battle’ was simultaneously the most far-reaching and lasting element in the social revolution that Hitler sought, and a decisive step in steeling the German armed forces for their fight to the bitter end. In this as in other areas, it was National Socialism's very modernity that endowed it with demonic force.

Implementing the dictators' visions required foreign policies designed to camouflage aggressive intent while wooing similarly ambitious allies, and armed forces capable of the wide-ranging offensive warfare needed to destroy the international order. Scholars have studied numerous aspects of Italian foreign policy in the Fascist period. But unlike the German case, coherent overviews are rare. Chapter 3 attempts to provide one, organized around an issue that since the 1960s has been thoroughly explored north of the Alps, the nature and extent of the continuities linking the foreign policy of the regime with that of its predecessors. The essay focuses on the restraints under which Mussolini labored, the difficulties encountered in choosing Fascist Italy's first victim, and the search for allies – especially for the vengeful German nationalist ally required to free Italy for Mediterranean domination. The armed forces and industrial establishment that Mussolini inherited received short shrift in the great war that he found at last in 1940. Chapter 4 charts the nature, extent, and impact of their inadequacies through analysis of the wartime career of the largest and most influential service, the Italian army. Chapter 5, although very different in structure and chronological range, seeks to explain why the outcome in the German case was infinitely more bloody.

Fascism and Nazism twisted, or ended, the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Interest in their origins has prospered even in the present era of historical pointillisme . The most disdainful adherents of poststructuralist theory or of the social microhistory of everyday life find it difficult to deny that dictatorship, global war, and genocide can ruin your whole day. The overall structures of the national histories of Italy and Germany from territorial unification in 1860/71 to dictatorship in 1922/33 and defeat in 1943/45 consequently remain subjects of passionate debate. Yet analysts of the origins of the Western interwar “Great Dictatorships” have for the most part avoided systematic comparison as a tool for understanding each country's trajectory. A few scholars have explored resemblances between the processes and consequences of territorial unification in the two cases, or have studied the regimes' structures or particular sectors within them in a comparative way. A vast body of writing linked to the concept of “fascism” (lower-case) has usually assumed a common parentage, sometimes due to shared features of the unification process and aftermath, although always within the framework of a generic concept that embraces other cases with entirely different origins and is itself prior to and independent of the evidence. But most interpretations have followed the well-trodden and exclusive paths of the national historiographical Sonderwege . Heinrich von Treitschke and his successors sanctified Germany's supposed distinctness from the West.

Mussolini and Hitler have not been alone in emphasizing the common origins, features, and destinies of Fascism and National Socialism. Theories of "fascism"-that elusive generic phenomenon with a small "f "-have proliferated with abandon ever since the 1 920s.1 Definitions have ranged from the Third International's "open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, and imperialistic elements of finance capital" through Ernst Nolte's militant anti-Marxism, to the modernization theorists' "mass-mobilizing developmental dictatorships under single-party auspices." Voices of caution have occasionally sounded, urging the "deflation" of a concept that "exists in faith and is pursued by reason," or suggesting that fascism fails to encompass adequately the ultimate evil of National Socialist Germany.2 But the notion is still with us, even if no two theories of fascism coincide. Almost all Marxists equate fascism and capitalism "in the final

This book offers a genuinely comparative analysis of the dictatorships that launched the Second World War: their origins, nature, dynamics, and common ruin. It seeks to understand their similarities and differences historically, without recourse to failed generic concepts such as 'Fascism.' The result is an unconventional and compelling analytical overview from territorial unification in the 1860s to national catastrophe in 1943/45 that places Fascism and Nazism firmly in the tradition of revolutionary mass politics inaugurated in the French revolution. Set within that overview are three chapters that interpret and explain Mussolini's poorly understood foreign policy and the character and performance of the military instruments upon which Fascist and Nazi success chiefly depended - the Italian and German armies. The chapter on the German army and the conclusion - which dissects the causes of the notable disparities between the two dictatorships in expansionist appetite, fighting power, and staying power - argue that a unique synthesis of Prusso-German military tradition and Nazi revolution prompted Germany's fight to the last cartridge in 1944–45.