Preface

History, the English historian E.H. Carr observed, “is an unending dialogue between the past and the present.” Here is a short history of the meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler, retold from the present Indian perspective overshadowed by the marauding march of the Modi-Yogi-Bhagwat band. It is part of a continuing conversation in which we ask questions, reflect on the answers we get, and use these feedbacks for charting a new, different course of advance, where the saffron fascists are pulled down well before they reach their cherished goal of a totalitarian Hindu Rashtra. History for us is interactive between past and present, and proactive towards the future.

In this study we have used the terms Nazism and fascism interchangeably, where the former is a specific form of a broader category or genus called fascism. As Umberto Eco points out in his 1995 essay Ur- Fascism (Eternal Fascism), there was “only one Nazism”, whereas “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” The novelist and semiotician refuses to “define” fascism, but points out 15 broad features – such as “the cult of tradition”, “rejection of modernism”, “disagreement as treason”, “fascism is racist by definition” and so on – most of which, with some regional variations (e.g., caste supremacism as an additional attribute of Hindutva fascism in our country) are easily discernible in Italy, Germany and India.

Indeed, over the past hundred years since it arose in Italy and acquired a more complete shape in Germany, fascism has taken on many national/regional colours and contours in course of adapting itself to varying contexts in different times and countries. Through all such mutations, however, it has retained certain core features or characteristics that place it in a very special category among comparable and allied trends like various shades of right-wing populism, authoritarianism, military rule, etc. Among these features, we believe, the single most important is the instigation and mobilisation of racial/ communal/ supremacist/ national-chauvinist mass frenzy for sneaking into the corridors of power and then engineering or attempting a complete fascist takeover of the state, all along relying on a carefully calibrated combination of demagoguery and terror, and progressively enlisting the support of big capital. In this pamphlet we study some of these features in their quintessential form in the classic case of Hitler’s Germany, where fascism had reached its zenith, because we believe a deeper knowledge of the original would help us better understand the derivative that we are confronting here and now – the current Indian variant.

Was Hitler’s rocket-like ascent really irresistible? Why did the left and democratic forces fail so miserably to arrest the rise? And that in a country gifted with one of the most advanced working-class movements in the world and leaders like Marx, Engels and their followers such as August Bebel, Wilhelm and Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin? Can we learn a thing or two from that experience, the huge differences between the then German and present Indian scenarios notwithstanding?

Keeping in mind the specific political purpose of resisting and defeating fascism in our country, in this pamphlet we have, rather than trying to tell the whole story of the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler, chosen to focus the spotlight on the period of fascist ascendance, i.e., the years between 1920 (when Nazism as a political force spearheaded by Hitler was born) and 1933 (when Hitler became Chancellor, going on to liquidate parliamentary democracy and establish a totalitarian fascist dictatorship).

This pamphlet does not lay any claim to original research. The biographical storyline and related facts we have taken mainly from Volker Ullrich’s Hitler: Ascent 1889 – 1939 (a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 2016)   and certain other books and articles, such as The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer (Simon & Schuster, 1960; and Economy and Politics in the Destruction of the Weimar Republic by Kurt Gossweiler; (the last one is an article taken from the collection Resistible Rise: A Fascism Reader edited by Margit Koves and Shaswati Mazumdar (LeftWord Books, New Delhi, 2005). We acknowledge our debt to these authors and publishers here at the beginning itself, because we do not wish to burden this activists’ handbook with detailed citations. We have also reproduced excerpts from an article on Fascism by Clara Zetkin (Appendix), who was not only a leading light of the communist women’s movement but also a major theoretician and activist of the struggle against fascism. Published in August 1923, it contains one of the earliest communist assessments of fascism and a basic guideline on how to combat it. For our political inferences and the overall presentation, the responsibility of course lies with the author alone.