In the Europe of the first half of the 20th century, there was a fair bit of racism and authoritarianism. It’s not like non-whites were generally well regarded even in places like the UK or the US. The idea of killing large groups of civilians wasn’t new (e.g.: the Armenians).
But while Spanish and Italian fascism certainly weren’t welcoming, Germany’s fascism was extreme in its combination or authoritarianism, military expansionism and racism.
Are there any reasons for this? Would it have been drastically different if Ersnt Rohm had preemtively backstabbed Hitler?
I take it that Germany was in a worse economic situation than Spain or Italy. Anything else?
From what I gathered in history classes and German literature (I nearly had a minor in German), The National Socialists capitalized on and exacerbated existing antisemitism to stir up and unite the largely unemployed and economically depressed masses. The draconian punishments laid out by the treaty of Versailles, and the feeling that Germany has lost WWI because it had been ‘betrayed’ left the masses very much looking for someone to blame, and any way out of the mire that was the German economy. Then along comes this man who promises both…
Rohm was no less antisemitic than Hitler. Whereas Franco and Mussolini were not antisemitic at all - the only people they were “anti” were the political opposition, especially of the Red variety.
So why was it that German (and Romanian) fascists were antisemitic while Italian, Spanish, Austrian and Portuguese let’s say were not? Short answer is, because Hitler and other early founders of the Nazi party thought that this was a good idea. Presumably if Mussolini were to live in Germany and set up the local fascism instead, there would have been fascist party members of Jewish ethnic background just like they existed in fascist Italy.
Longer answer might be that let’s say because there were a lot of Jews in Germany and they were unusually well assimilated, successful and influential, for the time period, they constituted a bigger political issue that you could be “for” or “against”. In Spain, by contrast, there were few Jews, so nobody would have been “for” or “against” them in any sense and this would be a non issue.
Similarly, the “Jewish question” existed in other neighboring countries where there were a lot of Jews, and it worked out in various ways. E.g. large Jewish community in Poland suffered a good deal of discrimination from both the government and private individuals in the 1930s which encouraged many of them to emigrate to Mandate Palestine and hence, as it turns out, survive the Holocaust. Whereas the large Jewish community in western areas of the Soviet Union did not face much trouble beyond the run-of-the-mill life under Communism because luckily that’s how the government wanted it to be. Majority of them survived too by fleeing eastward as “evacuee” refugees during the war.
Considering Spain* and Italy had very few Jews to begin with, there was no point in antisemitism there. Germany had a lot of Jews assimilated into society, which made them a convenient scapegoat. Austrian fascists followed Germany’s lead.
Combine a misunderstanding of evolution with mysticism, and you get the Aryan myth, which was extremely widespread and popular in Germany as early as the latter 19th century. It was a key part of the Nazi reaction against most of the tenets of modern western civilization.
But Mussolini was certainly racist enough. Some of the comments he made about the (black) people of Ethiopia that his troops were killing sound as bad as comments from American confederates of the pre-Civil War era, 4 generations earlier.
Although antisemitism was pervasive in Europe during Hitler’s “formative” years, it’s also worth noting that Hitler received much of his early political and social ‘education’ from such avowed racist and anti-Semitic figures as Lanz von Liebenfels, Georg Ritter von Schönerer, and Karl Lueger. To a large extent, then, Hitler was simply embracing and adopting the social persepctive of his mentors.