This article argues that squadrismo represented a central feature in the ideology and politics of Fascist Italy, influencing the whole period of the dictatorship. In the second half of the twenties, many squadristi became political prisoners, accused of being ‘bad Fascists’: it looked like the end of squadrismo. Despite punishments and (brief) periods of imprisonment, the squadristi actually continued to play an important part in the fascistisation of Italian society, in particular during the intransigent 1930s. By disciplining the blackshirts while continuing to make use of their particular skills, Fascism hoped to ‘tame the revolution’.

This essay revisits 1920s German debates over the illegitimate children of the Rhineland occupation to examine hitherto neglected fluctuations in the relationship between nationalism and racism in Weimar Germany. During the early 1920s, nationalist anxieties focused on the alleged racial ‘threats’ emanating from the mixed-race children of colonial French soldiers. After 1927, plans for the forced sterilisation and deportation of the mixed-race children were dropped; simultaneously, officials began to support German mothers’ paternity suits against French soldiers. This hitherto neglected shift in German attitudes towards the ‘Rhineland bastards’ sheds new light on the role of debates over gender and the family in the process of Franco–German rapprochement. It also enhances our understanding of the contradictory political potentials of popularised foreign policy discourses about women's and children's victimisation emerging from World War I.

When citizens recycle waste, we consider this an act of responsible ‘green’ citizenship. Today's consumers query the environmental impact of their consumption. Shoppers wonder whether the goods they buy are properly recyclable; others translate their concerns for the environment into a daily practice of separating, storing, collecting and transporting reusable waste. Most European consumer-citizens have incorporated recycling into their daily routine. Today, modern recycling is usually seen as a product of the 1970s, when grass-root movements and environmental policies generated new consumer practices. The assumption is that recycling only gained widespread public support from industry, politics and consumers a few decades ago.

The article delves into the concealed origins of Heinrich Gerlach's 1957 Stalingrad novel. A German veteran and former Soviet POW, Gerlach claimed to have recovered the memory of his wartime experience through hypnosis, after the original script, which he wrote in captivity, was confiscated by Soviet authorities. The author discovered this manuscript, believed lost, in Russian archives. It reveals how Soviet political re-education efforts prompted Gerlach to compose a memoir revolving around questions of personal complicity and guilt in German wartime crimes. Gerlach removed these soul-searching passages, as well as any reference to the Soviet origins of his memoir, from the published novel, which he presented as a self-generated inquiry into the tragedy of German soldiers abandoned by Hitler.

This article investigates the contested boundaries of the political within the working-class movements in Leipzig and Lyon at the end of the Weimar Republic and during the Popular Front. What the appropriate issues and places of politics should be was a question that was highly contested among the organisations of the local working-class movements in both cities. The article argues that an over-politicisation of the left-proletarian milieu in Leipzig contributed to the working-class movement's failure successfully to mobilise against the Nazis, while the dynamics of politicisation in Lyon helped the formation of the Popular Front in Lyon, but then contributed to its rapid collapse.

In the wake of the Great Depression, Sweden and the other Nordic countries were widely perceived as a model region, a successful example of the ‘middle way’ between socialism and capitalism. Central to this idea were the Nordic co-operative movements, which became the focus of President Roosevelt's Inquiry on Co-operative Enterprise in Europe, conducted in 1936–7. Drawing mainly on the records of the Inquiry, the article explores the construction of the ‘middle way’ idea and examines the role of the Nordic co-operators in shaping international perceptions of the region, while also shedding new light on differences within the international co-operative movement during the same period.

In two critical periods of German history, namely during wartime Imperial Germany and the National Socialist era, the German state resorted to salvaging waste to mobilise both people and resources at home for the war effort. Waste recycling efforts were part of preparing the national economy as well as home front morale for ‘total’ war. Since domestic waste – the generation of which was largely an urban phenomenon before the advent of mass consumer society – has traditionally been defined as a female responsibility, urban women were seen as the main pillars of waste work. Collecting, separating and storing reusable leftovers became a pervasive element of their everyday lives, as well as those of schoolchildren. Moreover, in the case of the First World War, under the umbrella of the so-called National Women's Service (Nationaler Frauendienst or NFD), women's associations set up grass-roots local waste collections before the state discovered the potential of waste for its war mobilisation efforts from 1916 onwards. The article highlights this self-mobilisation in the case of food recycling. Furthermore, it explores the continuities and differences between First World War waste salvage and later Nazi waste policies. Claiming to have learnt their lessons from the salvage drives of the First World War, the Nazis aimed at a ‘total’ waste recovery at the latest from 1936 onwards and took a top-down approach to reach it; in contrast, waste salvage drives of the First World War had been dominated by local and often female initiatives.

Rather surprisingly, Mussolini's blackshirts (the squadristi) have never really received the attention accorded to Hitler's paramilitary groups. It is interesting, therefore, to read an article that seeks to remedy this situation. Millan argues that the traditional view of squadrismo as important before the March on Rome but of less relevance in later years – indeed, as something of a liability – is too simplistic and needs revision. He sees the influence of squadrismo as permeating the regime throughout its existence and suggests that historians have been too quick in seeing the death of squadrismo in the supposed ‘subordination’ of the Fascist Party to the state in the years immediately following 1925.

This article examines the origins, implementation and results of salvage drives carried out in wartime France from 1939 to 1945. In post-war accounts – including memoirs and local histories of the occupation – these salvage drives were understood simply as wartime frugality, a logical response to wide-spread shortages. Yet a careful study of the records of both the French Ministry of Armaments and Vichy's Service de la Récupération et de l'Utilisation des Déchets et Vieilles Matières combined with municipal and departmental sources reveals that these salvage drives were heavily influenced by Nazi German practices. From 1939 to 1940, even though French propaganda had previously ridiculed Nazi German salvage drives as proof of economic weakness, officials at the Ministry of Armaments emulated Nazi Germany by carrying out salvage drives of scrap iron and paper. After the fall of France, this emulation became collaboration. Vichy's salvage efforts were a conjoint Franco-German initiative, organised at the very highest levels of the occupation administration. Drawing on the experience of Nazi German salvage experts, Vichy officials carried out the salvage drives according to German models. Nevertheless, they carefully hid the German origins of the campaign from the chain of departmental prefects, mayors, Chambers of Commerce and youth leaders who organised the local drives and solicited participation by evoking French patriotic sentiment. After the liberation of France in 1944, the French Provisional Government renamed but otherwise maintained the Vichy-created salvage organisations and continued to oversee the collection of scrap iron, paper, rags, glass and bones until 1946. At that point, the government largely relinquished control of the salvage industry.

Discussions about intermarriage between foreign Muslim men and German Christian women from the 1950s to the 1970s shaped concepts of Islam, gender and difference found in more recent integration debates. Those insisting on inherent incompatibilities between Germans and Turks since the 1970s have drawn on these tropes developed decades earlier. Yet the post-war context differed from the later period in three important ways: the Muslim foreigners were students and interns, not guestworkers; it was German Christian women (not foreign Muslim women in Germany) who were the presumed victims of Muslim men; and it was principally national church institutions that formulated the language about difference.

The Sezione Operaie e Lavoranti a Domicilio dei Fasci Femminili (Section of the Fascist Women's Groups for Female Workers and Outworkers) is the only one of the three Italian Fascist Party organisations for adult women that has never been studied. Founded in 1937 and recruiting factory workers, outworkers and domestic servants, it achieved a membership of almost a million by the fall of the regime in 1943. A top-down organisation, run by the largely middle-class Fasci Femminili, it offered its membership a mix of social, educational and professional opportunities. This article explores its activities, its organisational structure, the messages it attempted to convey to its membership and the reasons why such large numbers of women joined.

An analysis of Great Britain's campaigns to recycle books and paper reveals the paradoxes of wartime waste policies: destroying history and culture for the sake of reusing materials, and the impact of recycling on the war machinery's own wastefulness. Conscious of systematic recycling in Nazi Germany and its own dependence on imports, the British government established a salvage department only weeks after the outbreak of war. Beginning in 1940, this department required all large towns to collect recyclable materials. Salvage, beyond lessening shortages, served ideological and psychological aims, because reused materials were turned into weapons. This led to a critical redefinition of recycling as the war progressed. People who previously characterised the Third Reich's recycling programmes as typical fascist control now considered compulsory recycling in Great Britain wholly positive. However, protesters claimed the government was causing irreparable harm by salvaging items whose value far exceeded their worth as scrap. The harvesting of books, periodicals and manuscripts as ‘waste’ paper proved particularly contentious, with some arguing that their own government was adding to the destruction that bombs were causing to Great Britain's cultural inheritance.

The idea of fascism spread quickly and transnationally in the inter-war era. Fascist groups identified themselves as sharing fundamental characteristics and ideas. At the same time, they distorted fascism for their own purposes, adapting it to their specific contexts. As a border region, Alsace provides a number of examples of fascist groups claiming solidarity with fascism, yet distinguishing themselves from each other. Looking at fascism as a transnational phenomenon provides insight into the evolution of fascist ideology and will help explain why it is so difficult to define.

This article argues that traditional conceptions of honour and the social practices based on them were both persistent yet at the same time very fragile and changeable amongst post-war German steel industrialists. After a brief overview of how bourgeois honour developed up to the early 1950s, a study of the honour court case of one of the leading men of heavy industry, Hermann Reusch of Gutehoffnungshütte, which ran from 1947 to 1949, will be presented. This is followed by a description of the ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the Wirtschaftsvereinigung Eisen und Stahl to establish honour councils to enforce a price policy across the association. Both cases highlight the rapidly changing social and economic culture in West Germany in the early 1960s.

This article explores the pre-war background of the Swiss, Swedish and Danish men who volunteered for the Nazi Waffen-SS combat formation during the Second World War. Through a detailed biographical examination of officer corps volunteers, this article contradicts what I call the myth of the volunteers – a long-standing popular and to some extent scholarly interpretation that perceives the volunteers as lower-class, social outsiders of a criminally inclined or mentally unstable nature. Instead this article demonstrates that these men held a distinctly European outlook and were characterised by a high level of education, intellect and their strong personal character. Moreover, they had with few exceptions developed a longing for a radical reorganisation of the European political, social and economic landscape before joining the Waffen-SS. This longing was amplified by what these men perceived as a threat to the core of European civilisation coming not only from the Bolshevik East but also from the Anglo-Liberal West.

State projects aimed at technological innovation and social renewal were a widespread phenomenon in inter-war Europe. This is exemplified by the practice of internal colonisation – the construction of new settlements within state territories – in the Netherlands. This article examines one such case, the reclamation and colonisation of the Wieringermeer in the 1930s, in detail. In doing so, it reveals that the principle of state abstention, which prevailed throughout the inter-war period, was abandoned on reclaimed land. Politicians and experts perceived these territories as a clean slate on which they could experiment with new forms of government intervention. This article focuses on state policies of social planning and the technocratic governance of reclaimed land, and examines whether these could be reconciled with democratic notions of sovereignty and citizenship in the minds of the planners, the politicians and, last but not least, the pioneers themselves.

This article examines the coverage by Radio Free Europe (RFE) of the show trial of Rudolf Slánský in 1952 and contrasts this coverage with documents on the response to the trial within Czechoslovakia. RFE aggressively portrayed the trial as a pack of lies and condemned its anti-Semitism as not authentically Czechoslovak. The response within Czechoslovakia was more much nuanced. Most publicly accepted the trial as valid and acted in ways that underscored that acceptance. Within this acceptance, however, they varied from the trial script and brought their own meanings to the story. Those meanings were not always ones that either RFE or Czechoslovak leaders would have recognised as true.

This article adopts a political approach to examine the reasons why Edward Heath's government wanted to upgrade Polaris and the reasons why they did so by way of a programme called Super Antelope, to improve the front-ends of the missiles against Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile defence, as opposed to the alternatives on offer. It argues that the political contexts within which Heath took the decision have been insufficiently understood, and shows that the acceptance of the ‘Moscow criterion’ – the understanding that Britain had to have the capability to destroy Moscow – by central government represented continuity in Britain's cold war stance.

The Netherlands is reputed to be the first Western European country with separate waste collection. The first Dutch recycling container was established in 1972 by a local action committee of women, who were involved in raising environmental awareness and in critiquing the waste of consumer society. Their initiative was a huge success. Action committees in dozens of cities followed their example in short order, supported by national politicians. Six years later, glass recycling containers dotted the country. Although novel, and a powerful icon of the politicized climate of the 1970s, Oldenziel and Veenis argue that the quick success of glass containers cannot be explained in the political context of rising environmentalism alone. The ready acceptance of glass containers and the practice of separating waste were rooted in national practices of a culture of thrift on the one hand and coercive wartime policies of reuse on the other. Based on archival material, the authors analyse the ways that recycling container activism was rooted in the tradition of the culture of thrift. More specifically, they trace how the culture of thrift had been reinforced in coercive wartime policies when authorities dealt with shortages during the German occupation and how the practice became a source of the 1970s history of glass container activism.