Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

MYTH OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
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War between 1936 and 1939, and its rapid conquest of Albania in 1939, were further
statements of Mussolini’s aggressiveness in international relations. His dream was to make
the Mediterranean region into what he referred to as mare nostrum (“our sea”). In order
to accomplish this, he arranged a military alliance with Hitler in 1939 (the “Pact of
Steel”); earlier, in the name of fascist solidarity with Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s government
passed a number of antisemitic laws, whereby Jews were dismissed from government
employment and forbidden from marrying non-Jewish Italians. On June 10, 1940, Italy
entered World War II alongside of Germany. As the fortunes of war went from initial success
to a succession of defeats, Mussolini was deposed as Duce by the Fascist Grand Council
in mid-1943. Although he attempted a political comeback with Hitler’s help, he was
captured by nonfascist partisans at the end of World War II, and on April 28, 1945, he
was shot to death. His body, along with of those of his mistress and several other fascists,
was hung upside down on a meathook in a town square in Milan.
Myth of the Twentieth Century (German, Der Mythos des XX Jahrhunderts).
Title of a book, published in 1930, outlining the major tenets of what was to become
Nazi philosophy. Written by Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), Reich minister for the
Occupied Eastern Territories from July 1941, it complemented Adolf Hitler’s
(1889–1945) Mein Kampf (1924). The book influenced the language, ambitions, and
utopian rallying cries of the National Socialist movement, proposing a theory of
racism, society, and history that would come to characterize Nazism throughout the
period of the Third Reich. Rosenberg was a key Nazi theoretician and ideologist,
though much of his writing is ponderous and convoluted. Nonetheless, the book
impressed Adolf Hitler greatly, and he rewarded Rosenberg by elevation to the inner
circle of the Nazi cabinet during World War II.
In The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Rosenberg mixed a combination of art, music,
sociology, and politics in order to develop a theory that simultaneously exalted the spirit
of Germanism, demeaned the continued existence of the Jews in the modern world, and
offered utter contempt for the Roman Catholic Church as a faith that had for two thousand
years kept civilization in its thrall as a force working against the Nordic ideal. The
Myth of the Twentieth Century was also a viciously antisemitic work that outlined all the
essential characteristics of the Nazi paradigm of the Jew, a figure who was base, parasitic,
and destructive of Nordic culture.
Rosenberg operated according to an ideology of the nobility of blood; through this, The
Myth of the Twentieth Century was able to convey the image of the innateness of racial
superiority and inferiority. Rosenberg said little, however, that was truly original; much of
the work was simply a revisiting of themes that had been explored earlier in the writings of
authors such as Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816–1882) and Houston Stewart
Chamberlain (1855–1927). Despite this, millions of Germans accepted what Rosenberg
had to say as authoritative and the last word of the race issue. In fact, sales of the book
during the Third Reich were second to only Mein Kampf.