A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

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