German and Jewish Conspiracies: The October Revolution from the Perspective of the Italian Fascists and the German National Socialists

Abstract

In his contribution, Ulrich Schmid traces the reception of the October revolution in Italian Fascism and German National-Socialism. The leaders of both movements were quick to denounce the Bolshevik coup as a foreign conspiracy. Hitler highlighted the Jewish origin of the Russian revolutionaries. Mussolini mistook the Jewish last names for German ones and even mixed up Lenin with the Menshevik leader Tsederbaum; for Mussolini, the October revolution was a German plot. Even though Fascists and Nazis were fiercely opposed to the Leninist ideology, they were deeply impressed with the effective seizure of political power in Russia. Both Mussolini and Hitler were not eager to accept the fact that they were appointed as heads of governments by the king or the president respectively. Rather, they stressed the revolutionary character of their new political systems. At the same time, there were clear differences in the concepts of the state that was to be produced by the self-declared revolutions in the three countries: In Soviet Russia, the state was supposed to wither away; in Italy, the state was the ultimate goal of the Fascist society; in Nazi Germany, the state was expected to transform itself eventually into an eternal “Reich.”