The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

In America, the postwar slump had been brief and, throughout the twenties, business continued to expand. America was replacing Britain as the ‘workshop of the world’, and Britain’s own industry had been undermined by a decision made by Winston Churchill in 1925 – to return to the gold standard at the old pre-war rate. This was good for national pride but bad for business, since the pound sterling was no longer worth as much as it had been in 1914. Across the Atlantic, prosperity engendered confidence and confidence engendered more prosperity. When Britain, Germany and France begged America to lower its interest rates, to stop the alarming flow of gold from Europe to America, the Federal Reserve obliged. Now money was cheaper to borrow, and in the climate of optimism, everyone scrambled to borrow it. Everyone was eager to invest. There were even special companies whose sole purpose was to invest borrowed money in other companies, which, in turn, would invest in others. Karl Marx would have been able to point out the weakness in this system. Profit is produced by labour. And if millions of investors are all waiting for their dividends, there may not be enough profit to go round. This is what began to happen towards the end of the 1920s. The ‘land boom’ in Florida also demonstrated what could go wrong with capitalist economy. The newly rich all wanted homes in the sunshine, so land prices in Florida rose steadily. Finally, areas of inland swamp were being sold for the price of land by the seashore, while the investors only knew they were getting ‘real estate’ in Florida. Finally, people went to inspect their holdings, discovered they were almost worthless, and tried to sell at any price. The result was a slump in the value of Florida land; in 1928 it was worth only about a sixth of what it had been worth in 1925.

In October 1929, the disaster that Marx could have foretold overtook the investment companies. For no understandable reason, the stock exchange in Wall Street suddenly lost confidence on 24 October and everyone began to sell. Brokers realised that this loss of confidence could be a disaster, and united to start buying again. This averted the collapse. But it began again less than a week later, and continued steadily for the next three years. Nine thousand banks failed. At the end of that period, a quarter of America’s workforce were out of jobs.

Since all the major industrial nations sold their goods to one another, the disaster spread around the world. Only Russia was unaffected, and this was only because Stalin’s Russia was so poor that it had nothing to sell to anyone else.

In Germany, wages were cut and taxes were raised: and the new crisis was Hitler’s salvation. In a 1929 plebiscite he had been disastrously defeated, and the government – which had brought back prosperity – received an overwhelming vote of confidence. But in the 1930 elections – with the unemployed now numbering three millions – the Nazis received 107 votes and became the second most powerful party in Germany. The communists ran a close third. In further elections in 1933, the Nazis gained 230 seats – not quite enough to give them the majority they needed. More elections were held, to break the deadlock; the Nazis now lost seats and the communists gained. But finally, when attempts to form a coalition of the other parties failed, the president, Hindenburg, was forced to appoint Hitler chancellor. It was 30 January 1933.

The first thing he did was to ban the Communist Party, hoping this would provoke a rising and provide an excuse for his storm troopers to destroy the communists. He was disappointed; the communists contented themselves with urging the workers to rebel, but avoided presenting themselves as targets. Then, on 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building burst into flames. The culprit was a Dutch ex-communist named van der Lubbe, and subsequent investigation has shown that he acted alone (although most historians still accuse the Nazis of starting the fire). The next day, Hitler persuaded Hindenburg to sign a decree suspending various civil liberties. Then, with an ease that profoundly shocked the communist parties of the rest of Europe, the Nazis stamped out communism in Germany. Van der Lubbe was executed.

The rest of the world felt no particular alarm at the rise of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. The world economy was in crisis, and strong leaders were needed to deal with it. Their method was to attempt to regulate the economy through government intervention – a principle that became known as Keynesianism, after J. M. Keynes. Keynes did not believe that ‘market forces’ – supply and demand – will finally restore prosperity, after eliminating the uncompetitive businesses; he argued that the government can use the nation’s taxes to create jobs and get rid of unemployment. Then the new workers will have money to spend, and the great economic machine will gradually begin to work at full capacity again. It was a principle known as ‘pump priming’. And to a certain extent, this makes sense. Whether the world is in full production or in recession, there is the same amount of manpower available, the same quantity of raw materials, and the same number of mouths to feed. What is lacking in a recession is confidence and enterprise. If the government can supply these, then it should only be a matter of time before prosperity returns.

In Italy, Mussolini had made an attempt to rescue the economy with the ‘battle of the wheat’ – an attempt to double wheat production. It would have been an excellent idea if the world slump had not caused a drop in the price of wheat, so that it could have been imported at half the cost. Nevertheless, the country responded to firm control, and the economy slowly improved. Hitler began an immense programme of public works – such as building motorways (Autobahns) – and organised the economic life of Germany into ‘national groups’ that could turn to the government for guidance or aid. Within three years, unemployment had almost disappeared. In America, the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, pursued the same policy with a Civil Works Administration providing work for the unemployed and a Civil Conservation Corps that used the unemployed on natural conservation projects. The NRA, the National Recovery Administration, attempted to rationalise the mad scramble of old-fashioned competition and to fix prices. It also gave all workers a right to join unions. In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled that all this was unconstitutional, and the NRA disappeared. But the workers were now determined to have their unions. The result was that American industry began to suffer from some of the troubles that German and Italian industry had experienced after the war, with clashes between the police and strikers and mass rallies. But since the communists were supporting Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, communism became for a while almost respectable in America. Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, and Father Coughlin, the ‘radio priest’ of Michigan, called for extreme socialist measures; but their rhetoric sounded ominously like that of Mussolini and Hitler.

And in Germany and Italy, the situation was already beginning to look dangerous to world peace. Only a few months after Hitler came to power, the Nazis organised a mass book-burning in German cities – not only communist literature, but works by writers such as Einstein, Thomas Mann and H. G. Wells. Hitler’s ‘brown shirts’ stood outside Jewish-owned stores, advising people not to go in. Then, in 1934, Hitler discovered that Ernst Roehm, the head of the storm troopers, was planning to get rid of him. On 30 June 1934, he flew to Munich, drove out to the Weissee in the early hours of the morning, and personally supervised the arrest of Roehm and his chief lieutenants – many of them in bed with young men, since the SA leadership was largely homosexual. Hundreds of storm troopers were shot in the ‘night of the long knives’. In the autumn of that year, a mass victory celebration was held in Nuremberg, with torchlight processions. In the September of the following year – 1935 – the ‘Nuremberg Laws’ declared that anyone who had more than two Jewish grandparents was not a German citizen; they also banned marriage between Jews and non-Jews. The rest of Europe began to realise that a revitalised Germany could be an uncomfortable neighbour.

Mussolini was less concerned with abstract issues like race. He enjoyed posing in front of crowds and making speeches; but at least he was tolerant of nonconformists. One of his strongest opponents, the novelist Alberto Moravia, admitted in an interview after the war: ‘Mussolini was not a bad man.’ But the same could not be said of many of his lieutenants. The problem of fascism was that it endowed nonentities with authority and allowed them to indulge their self-conceit. Hemingway has a short story describing a trip to Italy at that period – ‘Che ti dice la patria?’ In it an earnest young fascist practically orders the Americans to give him a lift, and a corrupt policeman extorts money from them because their number-plate is dusty. This was the real problem, both in Germany and Italy. Prussia under the Hohenzollerns had been a dictator state, but at least the police and the army were as sternly disciplined as everyone else, and liable to even stricter penalties. In Germany and Italy, any stupid bully who wanted to put on a uniform could become a minor dictator. In effect, it was a deliberate encouragement of the criminal element. Hitler had destroyed Roehm because Roehm wanted to ‘continue the revolution’ and increase the power of the storm troopers. But the increasing power of the Nazi party constituted the same pressure. A healthy army demands to be allowed to fight. In Italy, Mussolini found himself under the same pressure when there was a clash between Italian and Abyssinian troops in December 1934. Thirty-eight years earlier, the Abyssinians had wiped out 20,000 Italian soldiers at the battle of Aduwa. The new incident outraged Italian national pride. And Mussolini, subject to the ‘law of expansion’ that applies to all successful dictators, was not unwilling to court popularity with a successful war. In October 1935, his troops marched from Italian Somaliland into Abyssinia, and took Aduwa. By May of the following year they had taken Addis Ababa, and the Italian government proclaimed that Abyssinia now belonged to Italy.