America’s Second Crusade. William Henry Chamberlin

This attitude was designed to deceive his own people, as well as the outside world.

      Many Germans hoped to the end that there would be no war. Foreigners who were in Germany at critical periods before the outbreak of war and even at the time of Germany’s greatest military success, in 1940, were often impressed by the apathy, the absence of any signs of popular enthusiasm.

      It is sometimes represented as a proof of deep, incorrigible depravity in the German character that the average German seems to feel little sense of war guilt. But it is doubtful whether the average Italian spends much time beating his breast in repentance for the misdeeds of Mussolini. Should the Soviet regime be overthrown, the average Soviet citizen would feel little sense of personal responsibility for the horrors of the Soviet slave-labor camps.

      One of the most demoralizing effects of totalitarianism in any form is its tendency to paralyze the individual’s feeling of personal moral accountability. The state is so powerful, the individual so weak, that the typical, almost inescapable, reaction is one of helplessness.

      Nazism, like communism and fascism, was an ironical product of the war that was fought in the name of democracy. The hard core of Hitler’s following was recruited among men who, in their hearts, had never been demobilized, who could never adjust themselves to civilian life. A great part of Hitler’s appeal was to feelings associated with the lost war, the inflation, the economic hardships of the postwar period.

      Communists and Fascists may be inclined to dispute the essential kinship of these two systems. But it would be difficult to deny that the following ten characteristics are very important, politically, economically, and morally. They may be listed as follows.

      (1) The all-powerful and supposedly infallible leader. These three plebeian dictators—Hitler, the unknown soldier; Stalin, the son of a drunken cobbler, a hunted political rebel in Tsarist times; Mussolini, whose father was a radical village blacksmith—have reveled in clouds of sycophantic incense which would have been too strong for the nostrils of Tsar or Kaiser. “Sun of the entire world” is one of the many epithets of oriental adulation which have been lavished upon Stalin. The personal power of these modern dictators has been far greater than that of any crowned ruler of modern times. They have been subject to no check or limit in law or public opinion.

      (2) The single ruling party. Under communism, fascism, and nazism only the single ruling party has been permitted to exist legally. Parliaments in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy became mere rubber stamps for the registration of the party decisions. Voting under totalitarian regimes is virtually unanimous and altogether meaningless. No voice of independent criticism is ever heard.

      (3) Government by a combination of propaganda, terrorism, and flattery of the masses. All three dictatorships developed very powerful methods for molding the minds of the peoples under their rule. The Soviet, Nazi, and Fascist citizen (“subject” would be a more accurate word) has been enveloped in a cloud of state-directed propaganda. From the cradle to the grave the idea is drummed into his head, through the newspapers, the schools, the radio, that he is living in the best of all possible worlds, that his highest glory and happiness are to be found in serving the existing regime, that the “toiler,” the “worker,” the “peasant,” by this very service becomes a peculiarly noble and exalted creature.

      Open counterpropaganda and free discussion are impossible. And for those individuals who were not converted, there was always the grim threat of the secret political police. This body changed its name, but never its character, several times in Russia, where it has been known at various times as the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, the MVD. The Gestapo in Germany and the Ovra in Italy fulfilled the same functions.

      The citizen under totalitarianism enjoys not the slightest defense against the arbitrary violence of the state. He can be seized, held in prison indefinitely, sent to a concentration camp, tortured, killed—all without the publicity which would inspire in some resisters the spirit of martyrdom. More than that, his family is exposed to reprisals if he falls into disfavor.

      A Soviet law, published in the spring of 1934, authorizes the banishment “to remote parts of Siberia” of the relatives of a Soviet citizen who leaves the country without permission. Totalitarian secret police organizations habitually employ threats against relatives as a means of extorting confessions.

      (4) Exaltation of militarism. “Every Soviet family, school, or political organization is in duty bound to instill in the Soviet youth from the earliest age those qualities necessary to the Red soldier: military spirit, a love of war, endurance, self-reliance and boundless loyalty” (italics supplied). This statement appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda, official organ of the Soviet Union of Communist Youth, on May 21, 1941. One of the reasons for abolishing coeducation in Soviet elementary schools was to give boys an earlier start on military training.

      The names of Hitler and Mussolini will always be associated with glorification of war. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “What the German people owes to the army may be summed up in one word, namely, everything.” Drills, marches, and parades became second nature to the German and Italian youth.

      (5) Full government control of labor power and of the national economy. In this field the original methods of the totalitarian regimes varied. But the end result was strikingly similar. Communism started out as a violent social revolution, expropriating all kinds of private property from which profit was derived and confiscating almost all private wealth.

      After three decades it has evolved into a system under which a Communist managerial class, much better paid than the average Soviet citizen and with many perquisites of office, runs the state-owned factories, mines, railways, banks, and other enterprises, including the collective farms.

      Under fascism and nazism, owners of property were usually not directly expropriated, except, in Germany, for racial reasons. But they were subjected to so many curbs and regulations, designed to combat unemployment, to increase military output, to make German and Italian industries self-sufficient, that the employer became little more than a managing director for the state or the ruling party. The scope of state ownership under nazism and fascism was extended, and state interference and regulation became almost unlimited.

      Labor was organized, regimented, and propagandized in very similar fashion under all three regimes. All went in heavily for much publicized social benefits to workers, insurance schemes, vacations with pay, free sports and entertainments. All took away from the workers the right to form independent unions and to strike.

      

      The labor movement in Russia was run by Communists, in Germany by Nazis, in Italy by Fascists. What this meant was that the interest of the individual worker always came second to the supposed interest of the state and the policy of the ruling party.

      (6) Widespread use of slave labor. This is a natural and logical consequence of the Communist-Fascist belief that the individual has no rights which the state is bound to respect. Nazi-imposed forced labor came to an end with the military collapse of Germany in 1945. Some six or seven million workers, the majority recruited under some degree of compulsion and segregated in special barracks for wartime labor, were in German territory at that time. The majority of these uprooted human beings were sent back to their native countries. But over a million preferred the bleak and precarious life of the DP camp to the prospect of living in the Soviet Union or in the postwar Communist states of Eastern Europe.

      Slave labor in Russia began on a large scale when about a million families of kulaks, or richer peasants, were dispossessed in the drive for collective farming in 1929 and 1930. A large number of these kulaks, men, women, and children indiscriminately, were thrown into freight cars and shipped off to timber camps and new construction enterprises.

      Other groups swelled the numbers of this huge forced-labor system. Among these were dissatisfied nationalists in the Ukraine and other non-Russian regions, Communists who had been purged, persons suspected of foreign contacts and of too-active religious sympathies. Later, slave laborers were recruited from other sources.

      There were mass roundups and deportations from Eastern Poland and the Baltic states and other regions occupied by the Red Army. There were considerable numbers of German and Japanese war