What Is The Difference Between Fascism & Nazism? – Mythbusting Berlin

“Fascism was the first ‘-ism’ to have created its myth not before going to power but… after having been in power for some time.”
Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism

It’s easy to paint them with the same broad, blood-red brushstrokes.

The theatrical balcony pronouncements, the seas of uniformed followers, the jackbooted authority, the contempt for democracy, the cult of the leader.

From a distance of decades, Italian Fascism and German Nazism appear as twin monoliths of totalitarian horror, grotesque siblings in a family of 20th-century evils. We often use their names as synonyms, shorthand for a particular brand of violent, nationalist authoritarianism. To call someone a “’fascist’ or a ‘nazi’ in modern parlance is to level the same essential accusation.

But to the men who created these ideologies, the differences were not just real; they were fundamental.

Imagine a tense meeting between Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in the 1930s. Behind the staged photographs of smiling camaraderie and mutual admiration for the cameras of the world press, there was a far more complex reality.

While they recognized a fellow strongman, a kindred spirit in their hatred of communism and liberalism, they were also rivals, leaders of distinct movements rooted in vastly different national histories and philosophical obsessions.

Mussolini, the elder statesman of authoritarianism, often viewed Hitler’s rabid obsessions with a mixture of private amusement and condescension, at least in the early years.

To Il Duce, Fascism was a spiritual and political revolution centered on one thing: the State. The State was everything, a quasi-divine entity that gave life, meaning, and purpose to the individual. His creed was one of action, of national rebirth through unity and strength. The ‘master race’ theories emanating from his northern protégé struck him as crude, un-Roman, and vaguely ridiculous.

Hitler, on the other hand, saw Mussolini as a vital pioneer but ultimately one who had failed to grasp the central truth of existence as he saw it.