In Europe, the first clear step to war took place two years
later. On February 3, 1933, only four days after he had
been appointed chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler met
secretly with Germany’s leading generals. He revealed to
them his desire to remove the “cancer of democracy,” create
a new authoritarian leadership, and forge a new domestic
unity. His foreign policy objectives were equally
striking. Since Germany’s living space was too small for
its people, Hitler said, Germany must rearm and prepare
for “the conquest of new living space in the east and its
ruthless Germanization.” From the outset, Adolf Hitler
had a clear vision of his goals, and their implementation
meant another war.
There was thus a close relationship between the rise of
dictatorial regimes in the 1930s and the coming ofWorld
War II. The apparent triumph of liberal democracy in
1919 proved extremely short-lived. By 1939, only two major
states in Europe, France and Great Britain, remained
democratic. Italy and Germany had installed fascist regimes,
and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was a
repressive totalitarian state. A host of other European
states, and Latin American countries as well, adopted authoritarian
systems, while a militarist regime in Japan
moved that country down the path to war.
Dictatorship was by no means a new phenomenon, but
the modern totalitarian state was. The totalitarian regime
extended the functions and powers of the central state far
beyond what they had been in the past. If the immediate
origins of totalitarianism can be found in the total warfare
of World War I, when governments exercised controls
over economic, political, and personal freedom to achieve
victory, a more long-tem cause stemmed from the growth
of the state as the primary focus of human action at a time
when traditional sources of identity, such as religion and
the local community, were in a state of decline. Under
such conditions, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt
noted in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), alienated
intellectuals found fertile ground for their radical ideas
among rootless peoples deprived of their communal instincts
by the corrosive effects of the Industrial Age.
The modern totalitarian state transcended the ideal
of passive obedience expected in a traditional dictatorship
or authoritarian monarchy. It expected the active
loyalty and commitment of its citizens to the regime
and its goals and used modern mass propaganda techniques
and high-speed communications to conquer citizens’
minds and hearts. That control had a purpose: the
active involvement of the masses in the achievement of
the regime’s goals, whether they be war, a classless utopia,
or a thousand-year Reich.
The modern totalitarian state was to be led by a single
leader and single party. It ruthlessly rejected the
liberal ideal of limited government power and constitutional
guarantees of individual freedoms. Indeed, individual
freedom was to be subordinated to the collective will
of the masses, organized and determined for them by a
leader or leaders. Modern technology also gave totalitarian
states the ability to use unprecedented police powers
to impose their wishes on their subjects.
Totalitarianism is an abstract concept that transcended
traditional political labels. Fascism in Italy and
Nazism in Germany grew out of extreme rightist preoccupations
with nationalism and, in the case of Germany,
racism. Communism in the Soviet Union emerged out of
Marxism and the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Thus totalitarianism could and did exist in what
were perceived as extreme right-wing and extreme leftwing
regimes. This fact helped bring about a new concept
of the political spectrum in which the extremes were no
longer seen as opposites on a linear scale but came to be
viewed as similar to each other in key respects.
World History
