ABSTRACT
Both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany proposed the formation of new national communities that were based on three principles: the glorification of the ethnic group over all other peoples, the adoption of measures to protect the health of the ethnic group and the necessity to exclude elements deemed incompatible with the health of the national community. Both regimes believed that the racial or ethnic nation was a kind of organism that needed to expand to flourish. The Fascists and the Nazis were convinced that peoples were divided into inferior and superior races and that the stronger and more dynamic peoples had the right to expand against the weaker. Both regimes had a deep hostility to their Slavic neighbours – Poles, Czechs and Russians in the case of Nazi Germany; Slovenes, Croats and Serbs in the case of Italy. Each regime was fueled by anger. Germany resented the restrictions imposed by the Versailles Treaty of 1919 and Italy felt that it had been treated badly by the other victors at the Paris Peace Conference, but this bitterness went beyond politics. Italy was not respected because it was not strong. Italians were viewed as mere ‘mandolin players’ in Mussolini’s words. Only when Italy and Germany were powerful would they be respected and feared. Obviously, neither regime accepted the idea of a common humanity that gave all peoples certain rights. As Hannah Arendt argued in her Origins of Totalitarianism, the rights of man became restricted to the main ethnic
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in these rights, thereby assuming a diminished status as humans.2
