The following is an excerpt from Curzio Malaparte’s book Coup d’Etat, where he examines the psychology of tyrants by using Hitler as an example. Writing in 1930’s Italy, this chapter resulted in his brief imprisonment and several years of exile on a remote island. You can read Coup d’Etat here.

Those who refuse to believe in the danger of Hitlerism say ironically that Germany is not Italy. It would be more exact to say that Hitler’s tactics are not those of Mussolini. Recently, when I was in Germany to investigate at first hand what is called the Hitler peril, I was asked on several occasions if Hitler could be considered the Mussolini of Germany. I remember having answered Mr. Simon, Director of the Frankfurter Zeitung, who asked me this question, that Italy, from 1919 to 1922 and even afterwards, would not have tolerated a Hitler. My answer seemed to astonish Mr. Simon, who let the conversation drop.

Actually, Hitler is merely a caricature of Mussolini. Like certain Italian Plutarchs who are soaked in eloquence, rhetoric and literature, and like the nationalists of almost every country in Europe, Hitler sees in Mussolini merely a sort of Julius Caesar in a frock coat and top hat, gorged with the writings of Nietzsche and Barrés, keen about Ford’s ideas and Taylor’s theory and a partisan of industrial, political and moral standardization. This vain fat Austrian with hard, suspicious eyes, with his relentless ambition, and his cynical schemes, may, like all Austrians, have a certain weakness for the heroes of ancient Rome and the Italian civilization of Renaissance, but he has sufficient sense of the ridiculous to realize that the Germany of Weimar could never be dominated by a little Upper-Austrian bourgeois disguised as a Sulla, a Julius Caesar or a condottiere. Although he, too, is tainted with this aesthetic sensibility—typical of men who dream of dictatorship—one cannot believe that he takes a delight, as some of his enemies suggest, in embracing the busts of Renaissance condottieri in the museums of Munich. Let us be fair to him. He would like to imitate Mussolini but in the manner of a northerner, a German, who believes he can simulate a southerner, a Latin. He believes that Mussolini can be modernized by transposing him into German terms (which would be unpermissible even if intended as irony). His ideal hero is Julius Caesar in Tyrolese dress. Strange, that the climate of the Germany of Weimar should be so propitious to a kind of Mussolinian caricature that would amuse even the Italians.

There is no likeness between him and the bust of Il Duce by Wildt—a sort of Roman Emperor, his forehead bound by the sacred fillet of the Pontifex Maximus—nor the equestrian statue of Mussolini by Graziosi, which dominates the stadium of Bologna (a cavalier of the Fifteenth Century too heavy in the saddle for a well-bred hero), nor does Hitler, who is an Austrian of Braunau, resemble the portrait drawn of him by certain of his enemies.

“Hitler,” writes Frederick Hirth, a very great admirer of Stresemann and therefore not altogether fair to the National Socialist leader, “Hitler has the physique of the average Bavarian or Upper-Austrian. He is typical of the men of this part of the world. You have only to go into any shop or café in Braunau or Linz in Austria, in Passau or Landshut in Bavaria, to see that all the shop-assistants and all the waiters look like Hitler.”

His enemies claim that although he does not deserve to be taken for any shop-assistant or café waiter of Braunau or Landshut, yet the secret of his personal success—that of a man who has all the physical traits of German bourgeois mediocrity of intellect—-is none other than his eloquence: his noble, ardent, and vivacious eloquence.

Hitler should not be criticized for having succeeded, by sheer eloquence, in imposing an jron discipline on hundreds of thousands of rational men who were recruited from among ex-soldiers, hardened by four years of warfare. It would be unjust to blame him for having successfully persuaded millions of voters to support a political, social and economic programme which in itself is a part of his eloquence. We are not concerned with finding out whether the secret of his personal success lies in his words or in his programme. Catilines are judged, not by their eloquence nor by their schemes, but by their revolutionary tactics. The question is whether the Germany of Weimar is really threatened with a Hitlerian coup d’Etat: and what are the revolutionary tactics of this extremely eloquent Catiline, who hopes to capture the Reich and impose his personal dictatorship on the German people.

The militant organization of the National Socialist party is modelled on the revolutionary organization of Fascism between 1919 and 1922, before the coup d’Etat. A network of Hitlerian nerve centres, whose headquarters are in Munich, have spread from town to town all over Germany. The National Socialist shock-troops, recruited from among ex-soldiers and organized on military lines, form the revolutionary skeleton of the party. In the hands of a leader who knew how to use them they might well constitute a serious menace to the Reich. Staffed with former Imperial officers, armed with revolvers, hand-grenades and bludgeons (depots of munitions, rifles, machine-guns and trench mortars are scattered all over Bavaria, the Rhineland and the Eastern Frontier) they constitute a military unit fully armed and thoroughly trained for revolutionary action. Subjected to an iron discipline, oppressed by the tyrannical will of their chief who vaunts himself as infallible and who exercises, in the heart of his party, an inexorable dictatorship, the Nazi shock-troops are not the army of a German people rebellious as a whole, but the blind instrument of Hitler’s ambitions.

These veterans of the great war who dreamed of marching to conquer the Reich and fighting under the banner of the Iron Cross for the liberty of the Fatherland now find themselves reduced to serving the ambitious designs and private interests of a cynical and eloquent politician whose only conception of Revolution takes the form of an ordinary suburban skirmish with red Communist guards, of an endless series of inglorious conflicts with workmen in their Sunday best, or with starving unemployed, or of an electoral conquest of the Reich supported by a few revolver shots in the outlying suburbs of the big cities.

At. Koenigsburg, Stuttgart, Frankfort, Cologne, Diisseldorf, Essen, officers of Hitler’s shock-troops have confessed to me that they feel degraded to the level of the Pretorian guard of a revolutionary leader—a leader manoeuvering against his own followers, with the police methods which, one day, he will use to establish his personal dictatorship over the German people. In the heart of the National Socialist party, free will, personal dignity, intelligence and culture are persecuted with that stupid and brutal hatred typical of third-rate dictators. Though an Austrian, Hitler is not intelligent enough to understand that certain formulae of Jesuit discipline are nowadays quite obsolete even in the company of Jesus, and that it is dangerous to attempt their application to a party whose programme is a struggle for the national liberty of the German people. Battles fought in the name of liberty are not won by soldiers whose eyes never leave the ground.

Not only does Hitler debase his followers by police methods, by habitual secret threats and hypocrisy but also by his revolutionary tactics. Since Stresemann’s death Hitler’s eloquence has become more and more histrionic and menacing, but his revolutionary tactics have slowly evolved towards a Parliamentary solution of the problem of the capture of the State. The first symptoms of this evolution date from 1923. After the abortive coup d’Etat made by Hitler, Kahr and Ludendorff in Munich in 1923, all Hitler’s revolutionary violence took the form of rhetoric. The Nazi shock-troops have been transformed little by little into a kind of Camelots of King-Hitler. They are armed but docile Camelots. Their leader is less and less given to violence. He shrinks from the noise of gunfire. But it is since Stresemann’s death that Hitler’s party has suffered its real crisis. This great opponent alone could force Hitler to lay his cards on the table, and prevent him cheating at the game of revolution. Stresemann was not afraid of Hitler; he was a peace-loving man, though not altogether opposed to violent measures. In a speech delivered at a meeting of industrialists on August 23, 1923, Stresemann declared that he would not hesitate to resort to dictatorial measures if circumstances required them. In 1923 Hitler’s shock-troops had not yet become King-Hitler’s Camelots or a Pretorian body in the service of a silver-tongued opportunist; these troops were still a revolutionary army who believed that they were fighting for the liberty of their country. Stresemann’s death gave Hitler the opportunity of abandoning violent tactics with the result that his shock-troops lost a great deal of influence in the party.

Shock-troops are the real enemy. It is the extremists in his own party that Hitler most fears. Their power lies in the use of violence. Woe to Hitler if his battle forces become too strong: there might well be a coup d’’Etat, but not with Hitler as dictator.

What the Nazi revolution needs is not an army but a leader. The shock-troops who, even yesterday, believed that they were fighting to subdue the Reich are now beginning to see that an exchange of truncheon blows and revolver shots with Communist workers is not a means of capturing the State. Hitler claims the mutinies which have recently occurred among the National Socialists are due to the frustrated ambition of a few subordinates; but they really arose from a deep-seated discontent among the troops with Hitler’s incapacity. From day to day he is less and less able to push the problem of capturing the power into the realm of active insurrection.

The extremists of his party are not wrong in judging Hitler as a false rebel, an opportunist, a “man-of-law” who thinks he can make a revolution with speeches, military parades and parliamentary threats and blackmail. Since his brilliant political victory when about a hundred members of his party were elected to the Reichstag, an opposition has developed in the very core of the party which rejects Hitler’s opportunist tactics, and is more and more definitely in favour of active insurrection as a solution to the problem of conquering the State. Hitler is accused of being insufficiently courageous to face the consequences of revolutionary tactics and of being afraid of revolution. A captain of shock-troops told me in Berlin that Hitler was a Julius Caesar who could not swim, and stood on the shores of a Rubicon that was too deep to ford. The only way to explain his ill-treatment of his own followers is his fear lest they force his own hand, lest the extremists, the shock-troops, the hotheads should drive him along the road to insurrection. He seems haunted by an anxiety to protect himself against the Left Wing of his party, to subdue his shock-troops and to make them an instrument of his own plans. Like all conspirators who waver between compromise and active insurrection, Hitler is obliged now and then to throw a sop to the extremists: such was the withdrawal from the Reichstag of all National Socialist members. But his concessions never make him lose sight of the main objective of his revolutionary opportunism that is, the legal conquest of power. There is no doubt that in renouncing violence, rebellious activity and an armed aggression against the State, he moves always further away from the revolutionary spirit of his partisans; there is no doubt that. every victory won by the National Socialists on the Parliamentary field is lost by Hitler on the revolutionary field. At the same time Hitler feels all the more certain of support from an ever-increasing mass of the electorate, and of winning to his political platform the adherence of a great majority in the lower middle classes. By this means he hopes to give up the dangerous part of a Catiline so that he can play the safer part of a demagogue.

Indeed, the crisis which confronts National-Socialism might well be called a process of “social-democratisation.” It is a slow evolution towards legality, towards the legal forms and methods of a political struggle. The National Socialist party is a revolutionary army in the process of becoming a formidable electoral organization, a sort of “National Bloc” looking back on exploits with the bludgeon as a mistaken outburst of youthful inexperience, which might saddle the party with a bad reputation but would not prevent a profitable marriage. Hitler’s men are the “Salvation Army” of German patriotism. They could not have a more worthy leader than Hitler. Since the Germans cannot take Mussolini seriously, her patriots accept this caricature of him. It is notorious that the patriot in Germany is merely a parody of the good German citizen.

Among the concessions promised recently by Butler to the extremists of his party is the foundation of a school in Munich for the training of shock-troops in revolutionary tactics. But what are Hitler’s tactics? The National Socialist leader does not consider the problem of the capture of the State in the same light: as a Marxist. would. Obviously he underestimates the importance of the trade unions in the defence of the State. He judges their role not as a Marxist or a mere rebel, but as a reactionary. Instead of attacking the proletarian trade unions he strikes at the workers themselves. When he pursues Communism he is only pursuing the worker. The brutal tactics which Mussolini’s Black Shirts used against labour organizations were justified by the need to demolish all organized force, whether political, trade union, proletarian or bourgeois, whether in the form of a trade union, a co-operative society, a newspaper, a workmen’s club, a labour exchange or a political party. General strikes had somehow to be prevented and the united front of the Government, Parliament and proletariat had to be breached. But nothing can justify the stupid and criminal hatred of the Hitlerites for workmen as workmen. A reactionary party that attempts the capture of a democratic State never yet advanced one foot along the road to insurrection by persecuting the workman. In order to free his party from the dead weight of organized masses, Hitler should fight the trade unions systematically and thoroughly. The defence of the State has not been entrusted to the Reichswehr and the police alone, since the Reich’s policy is to confront Hitler’s shock-troops with armed bodies of Communist Red Guards and with the trade unions.

The Reich’s best weapons of defence against the dangers of Hitlerism are strikes. Hitler’s opportunism is at the mercy of a general strike which would paralyse the whole economic life of a town or region, and which would deal a fatal blow to the interest of those same middle classes who vote for Hitler. The German proletariat has gone on strike and hit the National Socialist shock-troops in the back, thus forcing Hitler to abandon Fascist tactics of fighting the trades unions. Today he uses his revolutionary army, a splendid weapon for the conquest of the State, as a kind of volunteer police force in suburban skirmishes against Communists. In reality, this warfare in the suburbs is, more often than not, an attack on workmen as workmen. This is all that remains of Mussolini’s revolutionary methods in the hands of a reactionary.

Hitler is in earnest about nothing except what happens to threaten his opportunist policy. After several abortive attempts, he decided to abandon Mussolinian tactics against the trade unions, because he was afraid of weakening the influence enjoyed by his shock-troops inside the party and thus of reducing the political prestige of their revolutionary role. Also he knew quite well that the proletariat must inevitably react by declaring a general strike, and that this would be a most telling blow to the interests of the electorate. Above all, the support of the bourgeoisie is an indispensable factor in his electoral strategy. His sole aim is to conquer the State by overthrowing the Reichstag. He shrinks from an encounter with the formidable power of the proletarian labour organizations which might bar the road of insurrection for him. It is in the electorate and on the field of legality that he wants to challenge the Reich government and the proletariat to the decisive battle for power. Every Sunday, on the outskirts of the larger German towns, Hitler’s shock-troops (forever prisoners of amass of millions of National Socialist voters), come to blows with armed bands of Communist Red Guards. This useless guerilla warfare in the suburbs is to the advantage not only of the big trades unions and Parliamentary social-democracy, but also for the Reich government, the electoral body of National Socialists, and for the right-wing parties. Someone has to teach the Communists a little caution and modesty.

But can Hitler be sure that his battle troops will always agree to give up their true revolutionary role? For their real purpose is not to fight Red Guards in the workmen’s suburbs, but to seize control of the State. It is not only for the purpose of marching against Communist squads, in the interest of all those who fear the danger of Bolshevism—that is, for the benefit of the patriotic bourgeoisie as well as the Social-Democrats—it is not for this alone that they submit to the yoke of Hitler’s violent and cynical dictatorship. They want to march against the Reich Government, against Parliament, against Social-Democracy, against the Unions, against every obstruction that bars the road to insurrection. And if Hitler himself does not…

In spite of his sweeping successes at the polls, Hitler is still far from controlling the Germany of Weimar. The strength of the proletariat is still intact; its formidable army of workers, the only powerful enemy of a National Socialist revolution, is stronger than ever. It stands firm, unimpaired, and ready to defend the liberty of the German people to the bitter end. Machine-guns alone can still open the breach for a Hitlerite assault. Tomorrow, it may already be too late.

What would induce Hitler to give up his dangerous opportunism? Is he waiting for Parliament to get the National Socialist revolution under its control? He is afraid of being outlawed. Hitler, a poor imitation of Mussolini, is not posing as a Sulla, a Caesar, a Cromwell, a Bonaparte or a Lenin when he claims to be the liberator of the Fatherland; but he poses as a defender of the law, a restorer of national tradition, and servant of the State. One should always beware of a dictator’s patriotism. The future of this sort of civic hero does not lend any brilliance to his revolutionary past. As Giolitti would say, “Hitler is a man with a great future behind him.” He has lost so many opportunities. He could have overthrown the State numberless times had he known how to take advantage of favorable circumstances. In spite of his eloquence, his electoral successes, his insurrectional army, in spite of the undeniable prestige of his name, and the legends which have been woven about him as an agitator, a man who sways crowds, a violent and unscrupulous conspirator; in spite of the passions he inspires in those who surround him and of his dangerous sway over the imagination and the spirit of adventure in German youth, Hitler is only a would-be leader. In Moscow I heard a Bolshevik, who was one of the most active instruments of Trotsky’s revolutionary tactics during the coup d’Etat of October 1917 pass this singular judgment upon Hitler: “He has all Kerenski’s good and bad qualities and like Kerenski, he too is only a woman.”

Hitler’s intelligence is in point of fact profoundly feminine: his mind, his ambitions, even his will are not in the least virile. He is a weak man who takes shelter in violence, so that he may conceal his lack of energy, his unexpected failings, his morbid egoism, and his clumsy pride. A quality common to nearly all dictators and one which is characteristic of their manner of judging men in relation to events, is their jealousy. Dictatorship is not only a form of government, it is also the most complete form of jealousy in all its aspects: political, moral and intellectual. Like all dictators, Hitler is guided much more by his passions than by his mind. His attitude towards his oldest partisans, the shock-troops who followed him from the very beginning, who stood by him in adversity, who shared his humiliation, dangers and imprisonment, who have been his glory and his power, can only be explained by jealousy. This will astonish only those who are unaware of the true nature of dictators, i. e., their violent and timid psychology. Hitler is jealous of those who have helped him to become one of the foremost figures in German political life. He is afraid of their pride, their energy, and their fighting spirit—that fearless, disinterested enthusiasm which turns Hitler’s shock-troops into a dangerous weapon of power. He exercises all his brutality to humble their pride, to crush their freedom of will, to obscure their individual merits and to transform his partisans into flunkeys stripped of all dignity. Like all dictators, Hitler loves only those whom he can despise. His ambition is to be able one day to debase and humble the whole German nation and to reduce it to a state of servitude, in the name of German liberty, glory and power.

There is something confused, equivocal, something morbidly sexual in Hitler’s opportunist tactics, in his aversion from revolutionary violence, and in his hatred of every form of individual freedom and dignity. In the history of nations, at moments of great misfortune, after wars, invasions, or famines, there is always one man who rises above the masses and enforces his will, his ambition and his bitterness; who “wreaks a woman-like revenge” upon the whole people, for all the freedom, power and happiness that has been lost. In the history of European countries it is Germany’s turn now: Hitler is the dictator, the “woman” Germany deserves. The feminine side of him explains Hitler’s success, his domination of the crowd and the enthusiasm he rouses in the youth of Germany. In the eyes of the common people Hitler is untainted, ascetic, a mystical interpreter of action, a kind of saint. It is not as a Catiline that he wins approval. “No story of a woman is coupled with his name,” say his biographers. One ought rather to say of dictators, in general, that no story of a man is coupled with their name.

In every dictator’s life there are moments which reveal the cloudy, unhealthy and sexual depths of his power; these are the crises which reveal the wholly feminine side of his character. In the relations between a leader and his followers these crises most frequently take the form of revolts. When he is menaced with domination by those he once humiliated and enslaved, the dictator defends himself with flaming energy against the rebellion of his partisans: it is the woman in him that defends herself. Cromwell, Lenin and Mussolini have all known these moments. Cromwell did not hesitate to use fire and the sword to crush the revolt of the “levellers,” who stood for a kind of Seventeenth Century Communism in England. Lenin had no pity for the mutinous sailors at Kronstadt. Mussolini was harsh with the Florentine Black Shirts. whose revolt lasted a year, up to the eve of the coup d’Etat. It is surprising that Hitler has not yet had to face widespread sedition among his shock-troops. The partial mutinies which have sprung up all over Germany in the ranks of Hitler’s battle squadrons are perhaps only the first symptoms of an inevitable clash. Opportunism in the course of a revolution is a crime that entails its own punishment. Unhappy the dictator who heads a revolutionary army but shrinks from the responsibility of a coup d’Etat. He may, thanks to tricks and compromise, be able to seize power by legal means, but dictatorships which arise out of a compromise are only semi-dictatorships. They do not last. It is revolutionary violence which legitimises a dictatorship: the coup d’Etat itself is its soundest foundation. It is perhaps Hitler’s plan to arrive at power by parliamentary compromise. All he can do, if he wants to forestall a revolt among his fighting squads, is to distract their attention from the capture of the State, and rivet their revolutionary zeal not on internal politics but on foreign affairs. Has not the problem of the eastern frontiers been, for some time, the main theme of Hitler’s eloquence? It is significant that Germany’s future may depend on a parliamentary compromise rather than on a coup d’Etat. A dictator who will not dare to seize power by revolutionary action never could intimidate Western Europe, which is ready to defend its freedom whatever the cost.