Hitler’s charred body in the ruins of his Berlin bunker and Mussolini’s corpse strung up by the heels in a seedy Milan filling station marked the extinction by squalor of their charisma. Devastated landscapes testified to the failure of both of them. Hitler aroused nausea as gruesome pictures of the liberated camps were released. The greatest obstacle to the revival of classical fascism after 1945 was the repugnance it had come to inspire. 1 Many have agreed with him that fascism was a product of a particular and unique crisis growing out of the cultural pessimism of the 1890s, the turmoil of the first “nationalization of the masses,” 2 the strains of World War I, and the incapacity of liberal Democratic regimes to cope with that war’s aftermath and in particular with the spread of the Bolshevik Revolution.
In 1963, the German philosopher Ernst Nolte wrote in a celebrated book about “fascism in its era” that although fascism still existed after 1945, it had been stripped of real significance. Important scholars have argued that the fascist period ended in 1945.
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