Biography, political leadership, and foreign policy reconsidered: the cases of Mussolini and Hitler

For many historians writing today, person-centred or biographical approaches constitute ‘the shallow end of history’, a field better left to amateur historians. However, since the 1990s, under the influence of cultural history and because of a growing dissatisfaction with structuralist approaches, some historians have become interested in finding alternative approaches towards the genre of political biography, partly inspired by the ‘new cultural history’ of the 1980s that prompted a return to the individual as a site for micro-history. In this article, I explore from my perspective as a historian of modern Europe what can or cannot be gained from the study of foreign policy through a strong emphasis of leaders’ biographies, an approach which political scientists and IR specialists such as Jack S. Levy have recently advocated. I shall focus on two of the most significant statesmen of the twentieth century, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, leaders of the world’s first fascist dictatorships and allies during the Second World War. According to Fascist and Nazi propaganda, Mussolini and Hitler were charismatic leaders exclusively in charge of their countries and above all of foreign policy. The powerful propaganda image of the dictator in total control makes Mussolini and Hitler an ideal case study to rethink the biographical approach towards foreign policy analysis and to ask if and how a biographical approach can shed light on foreign policy more generally. In this way, the article goes some way towards provoking a fruitful dialogue between IR and History.</jats:p

The Criminal Underworld in Weimar and Nazi Berlin

(Head of the SS and Chief of the German Police), gave a lecture to Wehrmacht generals. Himmler praised himself and the SS for cleansing Germany of the Jews and insisted that there must never be another 1918 – referring to the German revolution of that year, allegedly brought about by a coalition of Jews, Bolsheviks and criminals.1 This speech came weeks after the Allied landing in Normandy, when a German victory in the war was increasingly unlikely and the Nazi regime had begun to escalate its persecution of racial and social outsiders. Gangs of organized criminals, the so-called Ringvereine, supposedly dominated by Jews and Communists, were said to be subverting German society and undermining the war effort. According to Himmler: When a man was released from the penitentiary, an organization was already available to him, organized by a comrade who had been released from the penitentiary two or three months earlier. They would agree then: we will do a big job because we must make some more money again.2 Himmler’s speech reinforced a powerful Nazi myth about the criminal underworld, that it was part of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy which had crippled Germany under the Weimar Republic until the Nazis destroyed it in 1933.3 Concern with law and order was not exclusive to the Nazis, but to a greater extent than many other modern regimes, perhaps,4 they believed that the repression of crime was central to their gaining and maintaining popular support. Many Germans had been worrying about dramatically rising crime rates since the end of the First World War. Eliminating crime and thereby restoring the state’s authority was a Nazi priority, one of the chief reasons why the Nazis appealed to large sections of German society, as Detlev Peukert has shown. Even fifty years after the end of the Third Reich, according to oral history interviews conducted by Eric Johnson an