1.1 The ‘International of Racists’

Starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, a growing interest in cranial measurements emerged among race scholars. This Element meticulously analysed the dimensions and shapes of the skull, promoting the idea that the Nordic model distinguished itself from all others. This interest was transnational, with photographs and illustrations of both male and female figures featured in the works of Italian, German, Scandinavian, British, and North American academics (Poliakov Reference Poliakov1971; Kühl Reference Kühl1994, Reference Kühl1997). In other words, long before the advent of National Socialism and the dissemination of its principles, not only in Germany but also in Norway, Sweden, and many other Western countries, various scholars had started to advocate racist theories based on supposed scientific foundations.

Many of these scholars were doctors, eugenicists, and anthropologists who, in a short time, formed a veritable ‘International of Racists’ with branches throughout the West and, not infrequently, in Asia as well. Doctors, in particular, regarded as the guardians of public and national health, gained considerable prestige and, above all, authority on the subject of race (Billig Reference Billig1981; Belovari Reference Belovari, Gilman, Jütte and Kohlbauer-Fritz1998).

At the first National Congress of Eugenics, held in London in 1912, for example, there were over 700 attendees, including biologists, statisticians, sociologists, anthropologists, politicians, military personnel, veterinarians, and even representatives of the clergy and the church. Thus, it was not only a transnational phenomenon but also an interdisciplinary one, spanning various levels of society, government, and religious institutions (Kühl Reference Kühl1997: 27). The Italian delegation was led by Alfredo Niceforo, a prominent anthropologist and criminologist, and included Corrado Gini (economist and sociologist), Achille Loria (economist), Roberto Michels (sociologist and political scientist), Enrico Morselli (psychiatrist and anthropologist), Sante de Sanctis (psychiatrist and psychologist), Giuseppe Sergi (anthropologist and psychologist), and Vincenzo Giuffrida Ruggeri (anthropologist).Footnote ³

The German delegation, however, was led by Alfred Ploetz, a physician, biologist, Social Darwinist, and eugenicist known for coining the term ‘racial hygiene’ (German: Rassenhygiene), and included all the most prominent German scholars of race at the time.Footnote ⁴ Finally, among the most notable Nordic participants, the figure of Norwegian Alfred J. Mjøen emerged. He was a chemist and pharmacist who was particularly known for his studies in racial biology and eugenics.Footnote ⁵ More generally, however, these studies on eugenics were gaining considerable popularity even outside nationalist and conservative circles, which were more inclined towards a racist view of society.

Indeed, several socialist and liberal governments had identified eugenics as a hope for radically improving the physical and economic well-being of society (Weindling Reference Weindling1989; Schwartz Reference Schwartz1995). In this regard, for example, scholars such as Wilhelm Schallmayer, a urologist and one of the founders of German eugenics, who was the first to publish a treatise on the subject in 1891 but who was also close to socialist and social democratic positions, had emerged. Similarly, Havelock Ellis, a British psychologist who was progressive and scientifically aligned with some feminist positions, argued that the emancipation of women would enable them to choose more suitable partners for procreation (Marten Reference Marten1983). In the 1930s, collaborations and exchanges between American and German scholars intensified, even after Hitler came to power. The situation continued, despite some embarrassment on the part of the American authorities, until the outbreak of the Second World War, when the United States broke any hesitation and halted all forms of collaboration, direct or indirect, with Nazi scholars (Kühl Reference Kühl1994, Reference Kühl1997; Ordover Reference Ordover2003; Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans Reference Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans2013).

However, following the London Congress, the internationalist project proposed by the eugenicist Charles Davenport and the German doctor Eugen Fischer – who would later become a Nazi – declined due to the global turmoil that affected the world during and after the Great War. Nationalist divergences also had an impact on the international network of racists, who increasingly focused on developing theories suited to the national and colonial interests of their respective countries of origin. For example, in Italy, prior to the political and military rapprochement between Mussolini and Hitler, theories and studies regarding the supposed superiority of Mediterranean populations over Germanic ones circulated. Giuseppe Sergi, who was present at the London Congress of 1912, conducted various studies suggesting that the Etruscans, an Italic population even older than the Roman one, had driven the Aryans from their territory, thus saving ‘Mediterranean civilisation’ (Israel Reference Israel2010: 55). Between the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the Italian doctor and politician Nicola Pende criticised the racial theories put forward by the Germans Alfred Rosenberg and Hans Günther, only to later support, in 1938, the Italian Racial Laws, which effectively enabled Mussolini’s regime to promulgate the equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws enacted three years earlier by the Third Reich (Cassata Reference Cassata2006; Israel Reference Israel2010). The alleged ideological pressures from the German ally, however, do not constitute the only reason that led Mussolini’s Italy to take a clear stance on the issue of race. This topic emerged at the end of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1936), when the fascist regime was compelled to establish a principle of racial superiority over the subjugated populations (Garau Reference Garau2015: 122–123).

Initially, fascism employed the myth of Rome to demonstrate its imperial nature and, consequently, its spiritual and cultural superiority over other peoples. In this sense, it sought to frame its alleged racial superiority outside the biological definition promoted by National Socialism. This does not mean that Italian racism was less violent and discriminatory than its German counterpart, especially in light of the unstoppable political rapprochement between Mussolini and Hitler in the latter half of the 1930s. Italy, for example, was the first country to codify racist, ideological, and strategic legislation in the empire it had just conquered, subjugating Ethiopia (Labanca Reference Labanca2002: 129). In this regard, however, the ‘scientific’ dimension of racism should be examined separately, aiming to summarise the principles on which Italian fascism and German National Socialism sought to establish their respective racial theories. In the Italian context, historiographical debate has identified three main objectives that fascism aimed to achieve through eugenics. The first aimed to physically and morally regenerate the nation. The second, propagandistic in nature, sought to exalt Italy’s alleged economic efficiency as racially and culturally superior. The third fuelled the rhetorical impetus, derived from social Darwinism, according to which, after the trench warfare, the Italians had strengthened both physically and mentally. National Socialist racism, on the other hand, was based on the so-called Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community), which was to be preserved from the so-called enemies of the people by excluding them from society. In this sense, biology was considered an effective tool for the analysis and selection of the more valuable races compared to those deemed less valuable. Subsequently, when the National Socialists paired the concept of Volksgemeinschaft with that of Kulturkampf (cultural struggle), they arrived at the synthesis of the so-called Volkstumskampf: the racial struggle (Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans Reference Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans2013: 7). This approach would primarily target political opponents and Jews, as they were both deemed enemies of the German ‘people’ (German: Volk). The Jewish question, as will be examined later, began to emerge significantly as early as 1934 when, at the Montreux Fascist conference, the Nordic delegations, influenced by the National Socialists, emphasised the need to formulate a clear racial theory that was common to all countries and accepted by all organisations that, from that point on, intended to consider themselves universally fascist.

1.2 Mussolini and the Nordic Fascists

The origins of the various Nordic fascisms and their relationships with both Italian and German fascism appear fragmented and multifaceted, since they experienced different circumstances during the Second World War. In this regard, while Denmark and Norway faced German occupation, Sweden maintained its neutrality, unlike Finland, which, having been invaded by the Soviet Union, allied itself for an extended period with Nazi Germany. Each of these peculiarities offers different avenues for analysis, leading to much broader themes such as collaborationism in the cases of Denmark and Norway, neutrality as exemplified by Sweden, and the combination of anti-Bolshevism and anti-Slavism in the Finnish context. Moreover, Italian fascism, much like German National Socialism, did not spread in the same manner across the Nordic countries. Danish fascists’ concerns, for instance, were closely linked to the fear of a communist takeover. A common feature was the hatred of the trade union movement and the Social Democratic Party, which became increasingly strong in the 1920s. At the same time, there was clearly no widespread enthusiasm for a fascist project modelled on Italy (Christensen Reference Christensen2025). The inception of fascism, followed by the March on Rome, saw the emergence of small groups of self-identified fascists targeting social democracy and the labour movement (Karcher and Lundström Reference Karcher and Lundström2022: 4). The Duce, however, appeared to be quite popular, as a Danish veteran, Max Arildskov, who embraced Italian fascism early on, was nicknamed ‘Denmark’s Mussolini’ (Lene Bak and Emberland Reference 64Bak, Emberland, Karcher and Lundström2022: 28). Furthermore, there were some small local ‘fascistoid’ groups such as the National Youth Federation (Danish: Nationalt Ungdomsforbund), the National Corps (Danish: Nationalkorpset), and the group The Jutland Fascists (Danish: De Jyske Fascister), which were unable to generate a significant impact on the national political debate (Holm Reference Holm, Sørensen and Mallett2002: 5). Despite this, organisations such as the National Corps had adopted the style and methods of the early fascist squadristi. They were militant combat organisations that, uniformed in black shirts and armed with blunt weapons, aimed to fight against the left wing. It was a battleground that young people from various factions had rapidly seized (Krautwald Reference Krautwald2025), also thanks to the use of innovative tactics and means such as the bicycle. In the Danish case, for example, the bicycle became an important tool in the hands, or rather at the feet, of a new generation of political youth. More generally, in the interwar years, young people formed a social group that, for the very first time in history, became a key actor on the political scene, bringing with them new forms of propaganda methods inspired by international trends (Krautwald and Lundin Reference Krautwald and Lundin2023). In the context of early far-right groups, youth movements also became the precursors to the series of National Socialist organisations that soon developed in Denmark even before Hitler came to power (Krautwald Reference Krautwald and Seland2018: 171).

In 1930, the Danish National Socialist Workers’ Party (Danish: Danmarks Nationalsocialistiske Arbejder Parti) was founded, and it survived until the German capitulation in 1945 (Poulsen and Djursaa Reference Poulsen, Djursaa, Larsen, Hagtvet and Myklebust1996: 791–797). Despite this, in 1932, a local sympathiser, Johan Wilhelm Krieger, presenting himself as a spokesperson for the Danish fascists, attempted to make contact with Achille Starace, who was then the Secretary of the National Fascist Party. Count Capasso, then Italy’s minister in Denmark, suggested to Starace to avoid direct contact with him, as he was a figure of little esteem in the Danish political scene and likely also in that of the local far right. A year later, Mussolini sent an emissary to Copenhagen: Nicola Pascazio, a journalist travelling between Denmark, Finland, and the other Baltic countries. Pascazio learned from Krieger that Thomas Damsgaard Schmidt was the leader of the Danish fascists and that they often gathered in his shop, the Arena (Lundbak Reference Lundbak1987: 77–79).Footnote ⁶

Furthermore, already from 1934, there was a section of the Committees of Action for the Universality of Rome (Italian: Comitati d’Azione per l’Universalità di Roma, Caur) based in Copenhagen. It seems that the committee was founded after a visit by Alberto Luchini, a lawyer from Florence who was then the director of the National Institute of Fascist Culture (Italian: Istituto Nazionale di Cultura Fascista) in his city. However, Luchini had gone much further by establishing direct contact with local Nazis and Frits Clausen, one of the most fervent proponents of Nordic antisemitism (Lundbak Reference Lundbak1987: 83–85). This is exemplified by Icelandic fascism, which arose following the economic crisis that struck the island in 1932, thanks to a wealthy landowner, a student who had just completed his studies in Germany, and a stamp dealer. The political programme of the new party contained elements of biological racism that vaguely resembled the social Darwinism popular among early twentieth-century eugenicists. According to the Icelandic fascists, the race needed to be kept free from hereditary diseases; consequently, racial selection and education were deemed necessary. Furthermore, the organisation was antisemitic and adopted the same symbols as German National Socialism. Despite this, not only was the tiny party absorbed by a larger nationalist one two years later, but it was also not considered by the German National Socialists in terms of potential political infiltration (Gudmundsson Reference Gudmundsson, Larsen, Hagtvet and Myklebust1996; Vilhjálmsson Reference 75Vilhjálmsson, Adams and Heß2020). In other words, although the history of fascist organisations in interwar Iceland is short (Kristjánsdóttir and Pontus Reference Kristjánsdóttir, Järvstad, Braskén, Copsey and Lundin2019: 21), it is known that the first local Nazi party, Þjóðernishreyfing Íslendinga (The Nationalist Movement of the Icelanders), initially had close connections with the conservative party, Sjálfstæðisflokkur (Independence Party, IP). This does not necessarily imply that Icelandic Nazis exerted significant influence over the conservatives or, even more so, succeeded in forming any type of political alliance.

On the contrary, Icelandic Nazis faced opposition from conservatives, liberals, and in particular, Social Democrats (Kristjánsdóttir and Pontus Reference Kristjánsdóttir, Järvstad, Braskén, Copsey and Lundin2019: 21–23). Even in Iceland, however, the ‘red factor’ – that is, the fear of a communist drift – played a pivotal role in the development of an ambiguous relationship between the Nazis and the conservatives (Kristjánsdóttir and Pontus Reference Kristjánsdóttir, Järvstad, Braskén, Copsey and Lundin2019: 21–23). Just as occurred in Mussolini’s Italy to some extent, the conservatives sought protection and assurance of social order from those far-right forces that aimed to dismantle that order through different means, which were no less radical than those of the Bolsheviks. While the Icelandic case, on one hand, serves to emphasise the necessary distinction between fascism, National Socialism, and, more generally, anti-communism, on the other hand, it invites reflection on the importance of studying minor fascisms as factors of political interference and the polarisation of social conflicts in a country, in this instance, a Nordic one. In other words, it involves applying what has already been extensively suggested by scholars such as Paxton and Griffin, who argue that the analysis of peripheral and failed fascisms can provide significant insights for identifying both the ‘centre’ of fascism and modern, or otherwise different, nationalist extremist movements. In this regard, as precisely highlighted by Garau, the Norwegian case, like the Italian one, exhibited numerous interactions between nationalism, conservatism, and the emerging far-right groups in the formation of future and more aggressive forms of indigenous fascism. Furthermore, the situation in Norway was significantly more interesting for the ideological and territorial expansion plans of the Third Reich, both for strategic reasons and racial considerations. Although Vidkun Quisling still represents the universal figure of a traitor to his own country and the epitome of a collaborator, even becoming a term in the dictionary, Norwegian fascism had already manifested itself many years before his pro-Nazi puppet government and, moreover, with some quite clear references to Mussolini’s fascism. In particular, while the labour movement learned from Lenin, a segment of the bourgeois side believed that inspiration should be taken from the Duce.

Across various bourgeois and conservative circles, it was argued that the march of his black shirts had restored order and stability in Italy. For instance, in an editorial of Aftenposten, one of Norway’s major newspapers, Italian fascism was described as a ‘vigorous uprising of the people’s sound sense and national instinct, provoked by parliamentary corruption and the attempts of communism to create anarchy’ (Emberland and Kott Reference Emberland and Kott2012: 40–41). This narrative, although functional for those, like the conservatives, who needed a bulwark against the expansion of Bolshevism, served Mussolini to politically legitimise the March on Rome on an international level as well, presenting it as the execution of a popular mandate, which was, moreover, endorsed by the king of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele III, and not, as it could have been perceived, as an act of force more similar to a coup d’état.

It was precisely the methods adopted by the fascist squadriglie, bolstered by the legionari (legionnaires) who had marched towards the city of Fiume a few years prior alongside the poet-soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio, that inspired some Nordic fascist movements such as Karl Meyer’s ‘legions’ (Emberland and Kott Reference Emberland and Kott2012). This demonstrates that Quisling’s fascism was just one of the various interpretations of Norwegian fascism. Although it was the most well-known and apparently effective, there were more instances of local fascist experiences among the fjords (Dahl Reference Dahl2008; Emberland and Kott Reference Emberland and Kott2012; Garau Reference Garau2015). In addition to Meyer, there were various figures from nationalist backgrounds who, alongside Quisling, urged the Norwegian bourgeoisie towards a distinctly racist, and at times even antisemitic, vision of society. These included individuals such as Hans Solgaard Jacobsen, Odin Augdahl, Arne Bang, and Webjørn Gudem Larsen (Garau Reference Garau2015: 143–150). Quisling, however, was the most opportunistic, able to attract sympathy and financial support from Mussolini through his National Union (Norwegian: Nasjonal Samling) until the mid-1930s, only to then yield to Hitler’s better offers as the war approached (Brevig and De Figuereido Reference Brevig and De Figuereido2002; Dahl Reference Dahl2008). Even in Norway, there was a National Socialist party: Norway’s National Socialist Workers’ Party (Norwegian: Norges Nasjonalsocialistiske Arbeiderparti), founded in 1932. The organisation was primarily driven by young German activists connected to Norway for reasons of study, family ties, and relationships with other organisations such as Hitlerjugend, Deutschen Arbeitsfront, and even Sturmabteilung (Karcher Reference Karcher2009: 8). Following these minority currents (albeit influential within Nordic racism), there was, however, an even more niche movement like that of the Norwegian magazine Ragnarok. It was a circle ‘to the right of Quisling’ that had gathered around it several pro-Nazi Scandinavians who, for various reasons, did not agree with the political stance of Quisling and his National Union. The magazine was founded in 1935 with the aim of questioning European materialist culture, which, according to its founders, was responsible for the degeneration of society through phenomena such as urbanisation and industrialisation. They believed that all of this was the dual result of Bolshevism on one hand and capitalism (predominantly Jewish and Masonic) on the other (Emberland Reference Emberland2003; Emberland and Rougthvedt Reference Emberland and Rougthvedt2004). Within this circle, in addition to Hans Jacobsen, the magazine’s editor, the figure of Geir Tveitt also emerged, a talented and controversial Norwegian artist (Emberland Reference Emberland2008; Storaas Reference Storaas2008). In general, Ragnarok provided ample space for the entire Nordic far right. Notably, it featured contributions from Swedish racists such as Per Engdahl, famous for his concept of ‘new Swedishness’. Through a dual rediscovery of national and racial identity, he advocated for the revival of the Swedish population and, by extension, the broader Nordic population (Engdahl Reference Engdahl1935). In summary, it represented a new far-right Swedish socialism, more inspired by Italian fascism than by German National Socialism. As mentioned earlier, in Sweden, the situation was quite similar, as Mussolini and fascism had sparked interest among both nationalist circles and some Swedish intellectuals who viewed fascist doctrine as a novel element.

However, while Norway and Denmark, at least during the 1920s, did not appear particularly strategic from a geopolitical standpoint, Sweden, like Finland, attracted considerable attention in an anti-Soviet and anti-German context. In May 1926, a lorry decorated with Swedish flags rolled through central Stockholm. On the back of the lorry stood young men dressed in black, using a megaphone to agitate for their newly established fascist campaign organisation. The vehicle stopped outside a military barracks, where a few young frustrated officers accepted the leaflets. The following day, they sought out the fascists’ headquarters on Valhallagatan and signed up. One of them was Sven Olov Lindholm, who later became one of the leading figures in Swedish Nazism (Kunkeler Reference Kunkeler2019). In the autumn of 1926, the Swedish fascists made contact with the German captain Horst Pflugk-Harttung, who was a refugee in the country after having murdered the German communist leader Karl Liebknecht during the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919. With funds from a couple of sympathetic bank directors, he arranged to purchase and smuggle in forty machine guns, three hundred pistols, and large quantities of ammunition. The weapons were made available to the newly established Freikorps unit Munkska kåren and were hidden in various locations around Stockholm in anticipation of the counter-revolution (Emberland and Kott Reference Emberland and Kott2012: 45–46). Furthermore, figures such as the aforementioned Engdahl and Elof Eriksson represented some of the most significant interpretations of the Nordic far right, characterised by elements such as anti-parliamentarism, antisemitism, and anti-Bolshevism. In this regard, along with Elof Eriksson and Adrian Molin, Engdahl belonged to a category of intellectuals particularly close to Italian fascism, while simultaneously being proponents of various race and conspiracy theories (Wärenstam Reference Wärenstam1972; Berggren Reference Berggren2000, Reference Berggren2014; Lööw Reference 72Lööw2004; Ferrarini Reference Ferrarini2019, Reference Ferrarini2021a). However, the one who undoubtedly attempted to reconcile Italian and Swedish fascisms was Ivar Hjertén. He was a well-known journalist appreciated by the regime’s propaganda who, in the mid-1920s, wrote a book dedicated to Mussolini and his new alleged ‘democracy’. Perhaps because of this, he gained the favour of the regime and eventually became president of the Dante Alighieri Society in Stockholm, one of the main organisations for Italy’s cultural propaganda abroad (Ferrarini Reference Ferrarini2021a). This series of characters and organisations, often not even connected or collaborating with one another, suggests that Swedish fascism did not present itself as a cohesive phenomenon. On the one hand, it proved to be aggressive and, at the same time, capable of producing several political parties; on the other hand, it failed in its attempt to create a united movement (Karcher and Lundström Reference Karcher and Lundström2022: 3). In addition to this, Swedish fascism exhibited another peculiar characteristic that set it apart from other fascisms, not only those in the Nordic countries. This was what Kunkeler defines as ‘self-identification’, a central concept for mapping the ideological development of this specific local form of fascism (Kunkeler Reference Kunkeler2016).

In this sense, Swedish fascism distanced itself from nationalism, a recurring factor in almost all other forms of fascism, to embrace, instead, racialism, the result of a combination of Social Darwinism, eugenic thinking, and recurrent anxieties about degeneration and race (Kunkeler Reference Kunkeler2016: 388). In other words, it was a bridge between the theories of the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) and the subsequent development of Nazi biological racism. This is an innovative reading that breaks the common tendency to consider many fascisms, particularly those in the Nordic countries, as mere satellites of the broader Italian fascism at first and of the more aggressive German National Socialism later. Swedish fascism, despite being fragmented, did not represent, at least from the 1930s onwards, an imitative phenomenon. On the contrary, it aimed to differentiate itself, carrying with it, as much as possible, elements of originality, in an effort to create a blend of fascism that was ‘truly Swedish’ (Kunkeler Reference Kunkeler2016: 396). The impact of nationalism, on the contrary, played a crucial role in Finland where, exacerbated by the outcome of a civil war, the ideological core was that of a White Finland – an authoritarian, nationalist, and hierarchically organised state – an idea nurtured among the most radical of the 1918 Finnish Civil War Whites. A number of right-wing organisations founded in the 1920s carried this theme forward and developed it further (Lene Bak and Emberland Reference 64Bak, Emberland, Karcher and Lundström2022: 36). In this country, the rise of local far-right movements and the influence of Italian fascism were largely facilitated by the outcome of the Finnish War of Independence within an anti-Soviet context and by the subsequent emergence of nationalist far-right organisations such as the Lapua Movement (Karvonen Reference Karvonen1988; Alapuro Reference Alapuro, Larsen, Hagtvet and Myklebust1996; Silvennoinen Reference Silvennoinen2015; Rizzi Reference Rizzi2016). Furthermore, Finland was not only a land of far-right activists and organisations but also of sympathisers and sponsors of those groups. A notable example is R. Erik Serlachius (1901–1980), a Swedish-speaking Finnish industrialist, influencer, and politician within the political right, who also supported the Lapua Movement (Silvennoinen Reference Silvennoinen, Karcher and Lundström2022: 71). This grouping, appropriately contextualised in the Baltic region, represented a mix of nationalism, anti-Bolshevism, and irredentism, with significant parallels to Italian fascism. The Lapua Movement became a mass phenomenon after the boycott of a communist political demonstration in November 1929 in the town of Lapua (located south of the Gulf of Bothnia).

In this sense, the movement considered itself the continuer of the civil war and the advocate for the true Finnish national identity (Karvonen Reference Karvonen1988: 18–20). At the beginning of the 1920s, in fact, Finland had just emerged from a bloody civil war that saw the communist forces opposed to the anti-communist units with strong nationalist demands. Furthermore, many right-wing groups had been trained clandestinely in Germany during the First World War with an anti-Zarist perspective. Consequently, the 1920s served as the incubation period for the so-called Lapua Revolution, which was to be realised on the threshold of the 1920s and 1930s (Silvennoinen Reference Silvennoinen2015: 148).

In 1929, after Mussolini’s observers quickly identified the movement as a potential Nordic interlocutor, Italy decided to covertly back it in order to diminish German and Polish influence in the Baltic region (Cuzzi Reference Cuzzi2005: 121–122). Lapua simultaneously became the spiritual home of a movement openly inspired by Italian fascism that specifically proclaimed its commitment to protecting the values of ‘homeland, religion, and family’. The well-known composer Yrjö Kilpinen, for example, believed that the Lapua Movement represented both a spiritual and national revival for the country, emphasising the necessity of returning to an agrarian society based on the model of the peasant-warrior (Deaville Reference Deaville2005: 172). In 1932, the movement merged into the so-called Patriotic People’s Movement (Finnish: Isänmaallinen Kansaaliike), which maintained its sympathy for Mussolini’s regime. However, the admiration for the Italian black shirts was not sufficient to bring about a ‘fascist revolution’ in the country. Although the patriotic movement had reached parliament, the agrarian party and the democratic structures typical of Nordic society managed to resist attempts at authoritarian drift (Alapuro Reference Alapuro, Larsen, Hagtvet and Myklebust1996: 92). Moreover, Italian views of the Finnish political class, at least in the early 1930s, were far from positive. In this regard, Attilio Tamaro, then plenipotentiary in Helsinki, emphasised the limitations and weaknesses of Finnish society and government in a lengthy and often offensive report addressed to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Regarding the Finnish political class, for example, Tamaro wrote:

As for relations with the Soviet Union, Tamaro stated that there was no significant difference for the Finns between the Tsarist past and the present Bolshevik regime:

According to Tamaro, Italian fascism enjoyed broad support among the anti-parliamentary movements in Finland, within the conservative party, and among the right wing of the Swedish minority. However, in the absence of a strong leader, everything would inevitably lead, according to the diplomat’s highly reliable forecasts, to a deterioration of relations with the Soviet Union, as well as a reasonable rapprochement with Italy and a reconciliation with the old ‘friend’ Germany, one of the main supporters of Finnish independence from an anti-Zarist perspective.Footnote ⁹ In conclusion, at least during the 1920s, Nordic fascists were more interested in the method by which Mussolini came to power, partially overlooking the theoretical framework that, in the second half of the 1930s, would lead not only to the extraction of some fundamental principles of Italian fascism but also, and especially, to the development of local forms of fascism that were not always influenced by National Socialism. These were forms of fascism that spoke a different language, one that was understandable to a public opinion and populations quite different from the Italian and German ones. In this regard, as will be seen in Section 2, Italian fascism was not able to learn enough about the Nordic countries, their culture, and their political traditions (Ferrarini Reference Ferrarini2021a). This, at least initially, represented a decisive advantage for the ideological penetration of the Third Reich in those countries.

2.1 Montreux 1934

In addition to the founding of the Caur, the other major turning point was the Montreux Congress of 1934. The conference, organised and chaired by the Caur, represented the testing ground for Fascist internationalism (or universalism) and, above all, for the leadership of Italian Fascism over all other European Fascist movements. The main issue orbited around the matter of race, which exacerbated the opposition between Latin and Nordic fascisms. In particular, some Nordic participants, such as Quisling and Clausen, emphasised that Italian fascism lacked a clear and coherent theory on race.

As a consequence, National Socialism gained consensus and prominence in the landscape of international fascism (Ferrarini Reference Ferrarini2020c: 6). Furthermore, on the same occasion, Quisling challenged the supremacy of Rome and its fascism, emphasising that they needed the support of the Nordic race.

This argument paved the way for the disclosure of three additional embarrassing issues: the absence of the Nazis at the conference, the Jewish question, and the seemingly controversial interpretation of fascism between Rome and Berlin. With regard to the first issue, Quisling quickly abandoned Mussolini in favour of Hitler, who appeared more generous and functional to the political ambitions of the future Norwegian dictator. Concerning the second issue, however, the international fascist front fractured into two blocs. The first, primarily led by the Italians, circumvented the issue by stating that each country was free to decide on the situation of the Jews, while the latter, represented by Clausen, explicitly asserted that the Jews did not constitute a ‘nation’ but rather a ‘race’ (Longo Reference Longo1996; Cuzzi Reference Cuzzi2005). In other words, Clausen aligned with the Nazi world vision (German: Weltanschauung), which considered the defence of the Nordic race as a solid supranational pillar. The difficult task of finding a compromise was entrusted to Coselschi, who sought to harmonise the concept of nationalism with that of internationalism and, above all, to reconcile various nationalisms on an international level.

It was, in truth, a conceptual acrobatic feat, a political manoeuvre that the Nordic fascists would soon identify and criticise. According to Coselschi, Italian fascism did not intend to exercise any sovereignty over other national fascisms. Rome, therefore, was positioned as a source of universal inspiration, granting each nation the necessary autonomy to define its own way of being fascist according to its local needs. Moreover, he argued that the experience of Italian fascism, as the highest expression of the triumph of national identity, would not prevent other national aspirations from materialising through the fascist spirit. Although the reasoning was cumbersome, rhetorical, and vague, it temporarily distanced the comparison with socialist internationalism: no state, in fact, would have to alienate its national identity in the name of a universal creed (Ledeen Reference Ledeen1972). The Nordic response to Coselschi emerged from the small yet determined circle of intellectuals centred around Ragnarok.

It was the editor of the magazine, Hans Jacobsen, who addressed the dualism between fascism and National Socialism (Jacobsen Reference Jacobsen1935). In particular, he recalled the incident when the Fascist regime, in its efforts to ‘italianise’ South Tyrol (Italian: Alto Adige), removed the statue of the medieval Germanic poet Walther von der Vogelweide and replaced it with a statue of the Roman general Drusus. This gesture, according to Jacobsen, created a profound rift between Germanic and Mediterranean (or Latin) cultures, highlighting increasingly distinct visions of the state, politics, and race. Jacobsen, however, often signed his articles under the pseudonym Kjartan Kamban, through which he conducted violent attacks against Quisling himself (Lauritzen Reference Lauritzen2018). In an article from 1935, for example, he criticised Coselschi with the aim of indirectly targeting the leader of National Union (Kamban/Jacobsen Reference Kamban and Jacobsen1935: 195–196). The Norwegian journalist stated that Coselschi was clearly anti-German and aimed to universally propagate only the principles of Italian fascism. As a consequence, instead of defending the interests of the Nordic people, Quisling was selling them out to Mussolini’s regime. How much, Jacobsen/Kamban rhetorically asked, must Norway compromise to liberate itself from the Mediterranean, Roman, and Jewish yoke? (Jacobsen Reference Jacobsen1937). In this regard, the origin and nature of the relationship between Quisling and Mussolini’s Fascism are controversial, and to better understand them, it is necessary to return to the period immediately following the conclusion of the Montreux conference. A few days after the completion of the work in Montreux, Coselschi wrote a letter of thanks to Quisling. Besides expressing his deep gratitude towards the leader of National Union, Coselschi indicated that the first meeting of the coordination committee for the study of universal fascism, of which Quisling had requested to be a member, would soon be held.Footnote ¹⁰

The Norwegian politician was particularly invested in the theme, as he had been a fervent supporter of fascist universalism since the 1920s. In one of his earliest writings, Russia og vi (Russia and Us), he had convincingly illustrated the need to adopt the model of universal fascism as an antidote to Bolshevism, a reality he claimed to know very well after witnessing the Russian Revolution when he was an attaché in the Norwegian legation in Petrograd (Dahl Reference Dahl2008). The meeting, Coselschi continued, would be held in a city in northern Europe, the name of which would be revealed in a second instance.Footnote ¹¹ A few days later, on 7 January 1935, Quisling confirmed his attendance at the meeting that would take place at the end of the month in Paris.

In his letter, Quisling emphasised his desire to actively contribute, through the Caur and the coordination committee, to the formulation of a new European order.Footnote ¹² From the meeting in Paris, several cornerstones of a project aimed at overturning the European order that emerged from the First World War came to light. The Caur intended to create a network of similar European organisations, reasonably united by certain principles of fascism, such as corporatism. Furthermore, the Caur aimed to combat what it referred to as the power of international materialism and the occult forces opposed to the most sacred traditions of peoples and nations.Footnote ¹³ The resolution of the commission, voted on unanimously, also included the establishment of an information campaign aimed at influencing European public opinion in a clearly revisionist manner, simultaneously anti-Bolshevik and, where possible, openly anti-liberal. In particular, in the English version of the Caur manifesto found among Quisling’s papers, it stated:

The conference had an impact even in Sweden, where, according to the weekly information bulletin of the Caur, Swedish National Socialism (as it was called) was regaining strength under the leadership of its leader, a veterinarian named Birger Furugård. It was a solid political force, determined to overthrow parliamentarism and the anti-fascist bloc by denouncing the misdeeds of Marxism and adopting at times very populist rhetoric. As the bulletin reported, for instance, the Swedish national socialists were committed to establishing a social system that could fulfil society’s duties towards its citizens. They did not recognise, as they declared, class politics or party struggle; they wanted the national community.Footnote ¹⁵ The connections between Furugård’s organisation were strong both with Mussolini’s fascism and with Hitler’s National Socialism (Berggren Reference Berggren2002: 398–400).

For example, Birger and his brother had met Hitler as early as 1923, and one year later they founded the first Swedish national fascist party, the Swedish National Socialist Federation for Freedom (Swedish: Nationalsocialistika Frihetsförbundet). Subsequently, through a series of transformations and name changes, the organisation became the New Swedish National Socialist Party (Swedish: Nysvenska Nationalsocialistiska Partiet). Founded in 1930, it remained under the leadership of Furugård himself. The Sweden’s Fascist Combat Organisation (Swedish: Sveriges Fascistiska Kamporganisation), on the other hand, was derived from the Sweden’s Fascist People’s Party (Swedish: Sveriges Fascistiska Folkparti), founded in 1926. It was inspired by the Italian model, whose influence was transmitted by Elof Eriksson through the magazine Nationen. However, the rapprochement with German National Socialism took place between 1928 and 1929 when the name was changed to Swedish National Socialist People’s Party (Swedish: Sveriges Nationalsocialistiska Folkparti). In other words, they were organisations with an affinity for one another that, in some way, were helping to shape an ‘ideological axis’ of fascist origin that connected Rome (and the Mediterranean) to the Nordic countries through Germany. On the other hand, this was precisely the declared objective in the statute of the Caur: to exalt the superiority of an idea (that of fascism), not of a people or a race over others deemed capable of dominating. Similarly, Romanness, considered as a mission, constituted an idea of universalism. This, in particular, was written in the Statute:

It was precisely this claim to the centrality of Rome, however, that affected relations with the Germanic world and, more generally, with the Nordic one. Nevertheless, the idea of universal fascism found in Quisling one of its earliest and greatest supporters, and it was he who, in his notes, outlined a geographical division of world fascism based on the principles established in Montreux. According to Quisling’s notes, the ‘fascist’ world would be divided into five major areas.

The first, the European area, called ‘Europe’, further divided into Northern, Central, and Southern Europe. The second, called ‘America’, divided similarly to Europe into Northern, Central, and Southern. The third, even more roughly and superficially, called ‘Russia’ and divided between Russia and Ukraine. The fourth, called ‘Britain’, divided with respect to the colonies into Great Britain, the East (unspecified), South Africa, India, and Australia. Finally, ‘Asia’, divided between China and Japan.Footnote ¹⁷ Naturally, this division took into account the imperialism that each of the powers considered superior would exert over their respective spheres of continental influence, as in the case, for example, of China and Japan, or intercontinental influence, as in the case of the British Empire. In all this sedimentation of ideas, reasoning, and ideological compromises, however, Coselschi, and probably Mussolini himself, initially failed to take into account the disruptive impact that National Socialism had on the far right throughout the world, particularly in the West. As will be seen shortly, especially in the case of the Nordic countries, from the mid-1930s onwards, the ‘Nazi factor’ was decisive and forced Italian fascism to play a supporting or secondary role, trying to fill the few spaces left by the overwhelming German propaganda or to contain it through a more discreet strategy of cultural and economic consolidation rather than ideological and political.

2.2 The ‘Nazi Factor’

The rise to power of Hitler overshadowed Mussolini’s star in the landscape of global fascism and certainly contributed to the diversification of the birth and development of new movements in a National Socialist model within the more circumscribed environment of Nordic fascism. The main theme on which Hitler insisted towards the Nordic countries, as well as in all other cases, was that of race. In the Nordic countries, however, the issue was much more complex because, according to National Socialist doctrine, the Nordic populations, along with the German population, were superior to all others and, as such, destined to rule the world. These pseudo-scientific beliefs were the result of theories and studies rooted for several decades in Germany and many other countries of northern Europe. In this context, the theorising of Nordic racism played a pivotal role in the spread of National Socialism among far-right circles in northern Europe. The success of Hitler forced Italian fascism to develop, or at least attempt to develop, a clear theory of race. According to the fascist interpretation, the result of an almost forced compromise as demonstrated by the theoretical acrobatics of Coselschi, the ‘myth of Rome’ (Visser Reference Visser1992; Nelis Reference Nelis2007; Torchiani Reference Torchiani2009; Kallis Reference Kallis2011; Aramini Reference Aramini2015) placed the Nordic race and the Mediterranean race on the same level.

This was the result of continuous debates, comparisons, and pronouncements on the subject, which degenerated when Quisling questioned the primacy of Rome. The Nordic world, in other words, had moved closer to the theories of the Nazi Alfred Rosenberg, who in his work Der Mythus des 20. Jahrunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century) had exalted the supremacy of the Germanic race (Hoepke Reference Hoepke1971: 149). In Rosenberg’s thinking, for example, there persisted a recurring obsession with the role that the Nordic race should play. He argued that for a European renewal, it was essential to revive and strengthen the Nordic powers: Germany, Scandinavia, including Finland, and England. On these foundations, the leadership of Germany should rise, as a racial and national state, that is, the central power of continental Europe, but also as a security centre for the South and Southwest.

Therefore, the bloc formed by Germany and Scandinavia would serve as the bulwark against Bolshevism, to which England and the United States would later align through a racial policy favourable to ‘whites’. Italy, on the other hand, would occupy a vague role as an unspecified Mediterranean guide (Hoepke Reference Hoepke1971: 188). In the same vein, the Nazi poet Otto Bangert advocated for a rebirth of the West through the purification of Nordic blood, liberating it from the ‘poison’ of Judaeo-capitalism. Bangert argued that it was within National Socialism that ‘the last Nordic blood’ was gathered. However, since Mussolini had led ‘the armed youth of Lombardy infused with German blood’ to March on Rome, creating ‘the dictatorship of pure National Socialism over an Italy devastated by Freemasons and Marxists,’ he had established a model of ‘worldwide value for the guidance of German blood towards the liberation of a dying world due to gold.’ In summary, the fascist revolution would have been a hopeless episode had it not sparked a revolutionary flourishing of Nordic blood, particularly in Germany, where it was said the heart of the Nordic race resided (Hoepke Reference Hoepke1971: 150). In other words, the myth of Nordic blood was the link connecting National Socialist mysticism and its totalitarian policy. Hitler needed such arguments to legitimise both his ‘temporal power’ and the ‘spiritual’ aspect of National Socialism, as well as the biological superiority of the German or, more generally, Nordic race (Conte and Essner Reference Conte and Essner1995). In this regard, Rosenberg’s ideas were particularly functional to his project, as they provided an apparently ‘clear’ solution to the Jewish question. National Socialism required a philosophical, metaphysical, and religious ‘justification’: a general principle positioned as absolute, from which a certain practical attitude could be deduced. This metaphysical ‘justification’ of National Socialist antisemitism was indeed Rosenberg’s personal endeavour. He argued that the source of all genuine values was the Rassenseele (soul of the race); it was Blut (blood) that, in a mysterious way, determined the physical and moral character of a person (Bendiscioli Reference Bendiscioli1977: 45). Even Quisling, since his youth, was convinced that Norway was the homeland of the Nordic race (Dahl Reference Dahl2008: 9).

In addition to highlighting how the Bolshevik revolution was marked by the presence of many Jews, he did not fail to point out that the Slavs, as a race, were incapable of organising themselves efficiently. According to his views, this denoted a certain degree of inferiority compared to the Nordic populations and, consequently, also the Germanic ones. Nothing different, in short, from what Hitler had already expressed in the mid-1920s through Mein Kampf. In this regard, Quisling adopted an escalation of hatred and violence that led him to become, within a few years, one of the most diligent executors of Jewish persecution in the Nordic countries (Dahl Reference Dahl2008: 36). These beliefs, combined with the now definitive assertion of eugenics studies, led to several instances of fusion between science and politics. In fact, after the second half of the nineteenth century, interest in eugenics grew enormously in Scandinavia. There were constant transnational scientific exchanges among anthropologists, geneticists, and doctors, both Scandinavian and German. In Germany, taking advantage of these connections, studies on race began to intertwine with those related to cultural exchanges.

2.3 The ‘fathers’ of Nordic Racism

Although Hans Günther was considered the true theorist of race in service of National Socialism, there are numerous examples of scientists and anthropologists who started to merge eugenics with the humanities. For example, the German psychologist Ludwig F. Clauß, who during his academic training had studied philosophy, psychology, Germanic philology, Scandinavian studies, and Oriental studies. A student of Edmund Husserl, he specialised in the psychology of race, and among his most successful works are Die nordische Seele (The Nordic Soul) from 1923 and Rasse und Seele (Race and Soul) from 1926 (Lutzhöft Reference Lutzhöft1971: 47; Weingart Reference Weingart1995). Another prominent figure was Bernhard Kummer (Heinrich Reference Heinrich and Junginger2008; Dusse Reference Dusse, Junginger and Åkerlund2013: 77), who wrote a particularly illustrative work titled Midgards Untergang (The Twilight of Middle-earth). The word Midgard, deriving from the Old Norse Miðgarðr, represents the world inhabited by humans as described in Norse mythology. In this regard, in 1928, Kummer joined the National Socialist Party and, just two years later, founded a centre in Berlin dedicated to the study of the history of Germanic religions and ancient Nordic tradition. What is particularly interesting among the authors on race, however, is the presence of an American, Madison Grant, who in 1923 sent a copy of his book The Passing of the Great Race (first published in 1916) to Günther. The work was translated into German two years later and had a considerable influence on intellectuals interested in Nordic themes (Lutzhöft Reference Lutzhöft1971: 50–52). Grant was among the first to embrace the theories regarding a supposed degeneration of the Nordic race, which he believed should be preserved as superior to other races.

The Nordic traits, characterised by very fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, along with an inclination for adventure and war, were thought to enable the Nordic man to excel. However, according to Grant, immigration and industrialisation, along with the resulting mixing of races and a significant decline in the quality of life for Nordics, would lead to deterioration (Burgers Reference Burgers2011: 133). The German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz, on the other hand, attempted to provide a clearer definition of the word ‘race’, referring to any interbreeding of populations that, over generations, exhibited common physical and mental traits. However, Ploetz was also the first (Carney Reference Carney, Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans2013: 62) to use the term Rassehygiene (racial hygiene). In this regard, in 1905, he founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene (German: Deutschgesellschaft für Rassenhygiene). This institution was composed of members from the middle to upper-middle classes in Germany, who were among the first to accept the hypothesis of premarital biological examinations to assess whether a union was scientifically and socially advantageous (Carney Reference Carney, Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans2013: 5). However, continuing through this sinister roster of scientific personalities, Fritz Lenz cannot be overlooked. He, being a fervent supporter of the supremacy of the Nordic race, believed that it had created the Indo-Germanic (Aryan) language and culture (Lutzhöft Reference Lutzhöft1971: 117). Following Rosenberg’s line of thought, Lenz hypothesised the creation of the ‘blond international’ (German: die blonde Internationale), a fanciful yet ambitious idea that originated in his mind in the first half of the 1920s. In Lenz’s thinking, ‘international’ should not be understood as a sort of extra-territorial organisation that would maintain communication and contact among the various Nordic countries and their respective populations. Rather, it was a politically much more complex and articulated project that would adopt a system of confederation of the Nordic states and peoples, united in a sort of ‘league of nations’ (German: Völkerbund) capable of protecting their common interests. Naturally, although all of this was framed within a purely racial conception of people, Lenz himself failed to explain how such a confederation could be realised. He did not clarify, for instance, whether the states should bind themselves by forming an alliance, or completely or partially renounce their sovereignty, and so on (Lutzhöft Reference Lutzhöft1971: 254–255). Another influential figure in Nordic racism was the previously mentioned Eugen Fischer, who, in the spring of 1938, delivered a series of lectures in Italy on German racism. Guido Landra, who will be discussed in the next paragraph, believed that Fischer was one of the greatest anthropologists in the world (Lösch Reference Lösch1997; Gillette Reference Gillette2014: 68). Almost all of these authors owed their formation to certain ‘spiritual fathers’. If, as Hecht argues (Reference Hecht2000), it is correct to state that Hans Günther (who will be discussed in detail shortly) was inspired by the Frenchman Georges Vacher de Lapouge, just as Rosenberg drew upon the ideas of the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, then it becomes easier to understand the origins of a study that, at the time, imposed itself as a sort of revolution in the relationship between science and politics.

Scientific racism, in fact, arrived in Germany as an exciting discovery and was also promoted by Lapouge himself, who, living until 1936, maintained extensive correspondence with figures such as Günther. However, alongside Lapouge’s studies, Günther also incorporated those of other ‘great’ masters of scientific racism, such as Madison Grant, Ludwig Woltmann, Otto Ammone, and again, Chamberlain himself (Hecht Reference Hecht2000: 292–293). Among some Nordic thinkers, however, new trends were arising aimed at integrating the supremacy of race into a single example of physical, intellectual, and consequently political perfection. In Denmark, for instance, sports and physical fitness quickly became an effective glue between Germanic racist demands and the younger Scandinavian generations. In the National Socialist conception, the Danes represented a friendly and racially pure population, capable of embodying, through the common denominator of an athletic body, the Germanic ideal (Bonde Reference Bonde2009a: 1437). At the same time, several Norwegian intellectuals and scientists, such as Jon A. Mjøen, had spent periods of study and work in Germany, interacting with a significant number of colleagues and sympathisers of National Socialism. Mjøen’s scientific text, titled Racehygiene (Race Hygiene), was published, surprisingly, as early as 1914 in Kristiania (Oslo). Afterwards, from 1920 to 1931, Mjøen published a eugenics journal called Den Nordiske Rasse (The Nordic Race), to which the Danish geneticist Wilhelm Ludvig Johannsen frequently contributed until his death in 1927 (Lindström Reference Lindström1983: 105). Furthermore, the relations between Germany and Norway were shaped by Heinrich Himmler’s project aimed at creating a unit of Norwegian SS. In the mind of the Nazi official, the Norwegians perfectly embodied the image of the ancient Nordic farmer-warrior (Emberland and Kott Reference Emberland and Kott2012). In particular, it seems that the recruitment of Norwegians following the German occupation of the country was not aimed at military purposes, but rather at preserving and strengthening the traits of a supposedly pure race. In essence, it was about a ‘valuable commodity’ that could not be easily sacrificed merely on the battlefield (Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans Reference Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans2013: 24; Kyllingstad Reference Kyllingstad2014). In Sweden, however, there was an important institution specialised in race studies: the Statens institut för rasbiologi (National Institute for Race Biology) in Uppsala. Established in 1922 and directed by the Swedish professor Herman Lundborg, it was directly funded by the state (Wärenstam Reference Wärenstam1972: 21). The news of its establishment had naturally galvanised the proponents of the race theory, including Lenz. It was the first institution of its kind, and Günther himself claimed to have collaborated fruitfully with Lundborg at the institute from the autumn of 1925 to the autumn of 1926 (Lutzhöft Reference Lutzhöft1971: 323). In this regard, however, it is essential to understand how these theories were developed, especially in Germany, and on what cultural and philosophical foundations the main theorists of the Nordic race had matured. Although the Völkische Bewegung (Völkisch movement) should often be considered in independent terms, even auxiliary to scientific racism, it is also true that nationalism was able to permeate German society with similar beliefs through a mixture of social and scientific racism. In other words, it was an interdisciplinary experiment aimed at providing an ideally all-encompassing explanation of the alleged German superiority. In particular, the ‘cultural racism’ advocated by Gobineau, Lapouge, Lagarde, and Chamberlain traced back to the nineteenth century and had purely ideological origins. The ‘scientific racism’, however, primarily stemmed from biological-genetic ‘scientific research’, applied to man. These were the result of the rediscovery of Mendelian laws and, above all, of the aforementioned development of eugenics (Mosse Reference Mosse1964; D’Onofrio Reference D’Onofrio2007: 8). Once again, appropriately situated within the context of National Socialism, Nordic racism was a tool in the service of a vast experiment in ‘social engineering’ aimed at convincing the German population that it was destined for an inevitable dominating mission. In this regard, Walther Hubatsch, a German military historian of a conservative inclination, highlighted how Scandinavia represented a kind of fascination in the German imagination (Almgren Reference Almgren2001, Reference Almgren2003, Reference Almgren2005).

Their interest in that land and its inhabitants had very deep roots, dating back at least to the time of the Renaissance (Lutzhöft Reference Lutzhöft1971: 203). An approach that might appear as a sort of forced connection was, in reality, the product of a much more remote and structured cultural legacy. Metaphorically, it required a lot of space to allow this enormous imaginative body to grow, and the limitless northern lands represented the ideal place, the perfect and sublime climax in which it could expand. Evidence of this can be found in the enthusiastic accounts of Günther’s experiences during his stays in Norway. He was not only one of the major representatives of this forced connection, which unfolded as a new era of racial studies, but also the author of the work Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial Science of the German People). First published in July 1922, it became the ideological basis of Nazism in terms of race and eugenics (Lutzhöft Reference Lutzhöft1971: 31; Weisenburger Reference Weisenburger, Kissener and Scholtyseck1999). Günther drew inspiration from the principles expressed by the Franco-Russian anthropologist Joseph Deniker, who, in 1900, published Les races et le peuples de la terre (The Races and Peoples of the Earth). Subsequently, referring to the French meaning of ‘race nordique’, he translated it to the German ‘nordische Rasse’ and established it as the foundation of ‘biological racism’ (Almgren et al. Reference Almgren, Hecker-Stampehl and Piper2008: 10). Furthermore, Günther’s figure deserves particular attention for his seemingly compelling harmonisation of race, culture, and land within the Nordic-Germanic dichotomy. Born in 1891, Günther studied linguistics and German studies, first at the University of Freiburg in Breisgau and, subsequently, in Paris (Lutzhöft Reference Lutzhöft1971: 28–41). A failed but passionate poet, a volunteer during the First World War and a fervent nationalist, Günther already had the ideal profile to strip away the remnants that clung to the bones of German imperialism and extend it to a much broader horizon of the presumed racial superiority of the German people. His ideas were rooted in distant origins, drawn from the mountains and forests scattered between Norway and Sweden, which represented, not only for Günther, the ideal setting in which to contextualise theories of race.

The Völkisch movement’s interest in Scandinavia was motivated by the racial belief that these places were, if not the cradle of humanity, at least the original biological, spiritual, and cultural centre of the Germanic or Nordic race. This would explain the spread of pseudo-scientific racial theories by figures such as Ludwig Wilser, Herman Wirth, and Günther himself. Moreover, it would account for the emergence of associations and fraternities (Puschner Reference Puschner, Junginger and Åkerlund2013: 26) such as the Nordischer Ring (Nordic Ring). Günther was perhaps the one who, more than any other scientist or intellectual of the time, contributed to maintaining an archaic and unchanging image of Norway in the eyes of the Germans. After marrying a Norwegian and spending considerable time in the Telemark region of Norway, Günther managed to combine, at least superficially, the concept of Nordic racial purity with the mystique of an unspoiled and incorruptible landscape. However, he introduced a substantial novelty compared to the theories of his mentor Lapouge. While for the French theorist the supremacy of race knew no national boundaries, in the sense that no nation could embody a specific racial canon, Günther disagreed with this view. Following, probably with opportunism, the radical nationalist demands of National Socialism, he translated the theories of racial superiority into an entirely German version and, by extension, a pan-Germanist one. In contrast, Lapouge did not consider ‘Aryan’ synonymous with ‘German’ or ‘Germanic’ and did not view (although he was antisemitic) the Jewish race as inferior to others. These were aspects that clashed with the sensibilities of German colleagues, particularly those who had been more outspoken in support of National Socialism. Additionally, an important factor not to be overlooked was that Lapouge was French. This created discomfort among fervent German nationalists and Nazis who, although raised under the cultural influence of Lapouge, found themselves paying homage to an ‘inconvenient hero’ (Hecht Reference Hecht2000: 295–296).

At the heart of this conception, the National Socialists set a specific goal: to create a racial state through the modern means of social policies. Therefore, racial and social policies would be studied as a singular and indivisible subject (Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans Reference Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans2013: 2). Günther also drew inspiration from some studies by Niceforo, particularly regarding crime and Mediterranean psychology. However, he did not share their attitude towards modernity. For the National Socialists, technology was to be employed solely as a tool for the preservation and, indeed, the restoration of the ancient Germanic society. This would occur, therefore, through the use of weapons and progress in a reactionary manner so that Germany could first liberate itself from foreign powers and subsequently dominate them (Gillette Reference Gillette2014: 23–24). The direct consequences of this völkisch conception also manifested in phenomena such as antisemitism, anti-Slavism, anti-Bolshevism, and anti-Romanism (thus also anti-clericalism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Jesuitism), as well as a complete opposition to internationalism, feminism, parliamentarism, and Freemasonry (Puschner Reference Puschner, Junginger and Åkerlund2013: 28).

Despite his cultural and political weight, however, Günther never developed a scientific training. In the past, he had obtained a doctorate in linguistics and German studies, while all his subsequent knowledge was borrowed from more experienced and qualified colleagues such as the Norwegian Halfdan Bryn. Thus, a large part of the scientific groundwork for future National Socialist racism came from the theories of a failed poet who, in trying to pursue a writing career, became known to the public through a now-famous nationalist novel (Karcher Reference Karcher2009: 22): Ritter, Tod und Teufel. Der heldische Gedanke (Knights, Death and the Devil. The Heroic Idea).

2.4 Italian Views on the Nordic Race

The role of eugenics in the consolidation of nationalistic and colonial policies also prompted Italian propaganda to address the issue. Initially, during the 1920s, almost all Italian scholars on the subject preferred to use the term stirpe (stock) instead of razza (race). Sergi, for example, had founded a school of thought advocating the Mediterranean cause, according to which Italians, being the product of a successful combination of lineages, embodied the best result of Latin and, by extension, Mediterranean civilisation. This allowed Italians to take on the alleged task of leading a civilising and universal mission across the world (Labanca Reference Labanca2002: 155). This school of thought included notable scholars such as Sabato Visco, Giacomo Acerbo, and Nicola Pende (Cassina Wolff Reference Cassina Wolff, Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans2013: 178–179). This means that in Italy, a growing group of intellectuals emerged, some of whom were even antisemitic, who, regardless of their level of racism, amplified its popularity (Rodogno Reference Rodogno2003: 70–71). Fascism, in fact, carried the seeds of racism from its origins and was, by culture and temperament, racist. The fear of demographic decline did not stem from Malthusian reasons, but rather from the concern that the ‘yellow’ and ‘black’ races, as they grew, could suffocate the ‘civilisation of the white man’ (Del Boca Reference Del Boca2005: 200). In this sense, all colonial empires were based on a simple framework in which the ‘whites’ governed and the ‘others’ obeyed. Italy, in turn, was the first country to codify racist, ideological, and strategic legislation in an empire it had just conquered (Labanca Reference Labanca2002: 129). As in the case of anti-Slavism, however, Italian racism also manifested among ‘whites’. This was illustrated, for example, by the characteristics of the so-called border fascism along the Italian–Yugoslav borders and the attempt at ‘ethnic cleansing’ carried out by Italian fascists during the occupation of Slovenia (Del Boca Reference Del Boca2005: 237–264). Consequently, regardless of the alleged side effects brought about by the Rome–Berlin Axis, it cannot be ruled out that 1937 had become the ‘key year’ for the development of a theory of race that was scientifically ‘clear’, legally ‘applicable’, and preparatory to the racial laws of 1938 (Sarfatti Reference Sarfatti2007; Israel Reference Israel2010; Galimi Reference Galimi2018; Edallo Reference Edallo2023).

In this racist climate, in February 1938, Mussolini entrusted the young Guido Landra with the task of creating a scientific commission aimed at launching a racial campaign in Italy. Landra had likely also participated in the numerous conferences organised by Fischer in Italy on behalf of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin. Despite this, Italian-derived racism, although chaotic and approximate, seemed to be based on two ‘dogmas’. Firstly, a principle of ‘Latinity’ and, by extension, ‘Italianness’, of which only Fascism could presumably be the interpreter. Secondly, an even more relevant principle in cultural and political propaganda was that of a universal ‘civilising mission’ that the Italian and fascist people were called upon to fulfil (Colacicco Reference Colacicco2018: 34). Visco and Acerbo subscribed to this line of thought, believing that it was prudent to downsize the ‘Aryan’ concept in favour of the ‘Mediterranean’ notion of the supposed Italic race, unlike the ambitious pro-Nazi Landra, a staunch supporter of biological racism (Cassata Reference Cassata2008: 66). Giuseppe Bottai also cautiously stated that Italian racism, although based on biological data (as outlined in the Manifesto of Racist Scientists in 1938), was predominantly characterised by ‘spiritual’ elements (Michaelis Reference Michaelis2001; De Felice and Moro Reference De Felice and Moro2011). At this point, however, all the contradictions of Italian racial and anti-Semitic policy emerged. From the second half of the 1930s, in fact, the essential element for acquiring Italian citizenship became race. In Italian anti-Jewish legislation, for instance, the normative definition of ‘a person belonging to the Jewish race’ had a racial, rather than religious, connotation. In other words, the construction of a ‘racial state’ had also begun in Italy, where, however, the methods and peculiar characteristics appeared confused and heterogeneous. In this regard, there were authors, such as Giulio Cogni, who unsuccessfully attempted to establish a coherent theory of Italian racism (Dell’Era Reference 67Dell’Era2016: 1–3). Thanks to his connections with German race theorists, he believed it was possible to harmonise and combine Italian racism with Germanic racism (Dell’Era Reference 67Dell’Era2016, Reference Dell’Era2017, Reference Dell’Era2018). For example, in the work Il razzismo (Racism) Cogni synthesised the contents of German racism by combining the idealism of Giovanni Gentile, probably the most important philosopher of Italian Fascism, with the biological mysticism of Rosenberg and Günther (Cogni Reference Cogni1937a). Furthermore, he attempted to explain National Socialism through racism, as if the latter were the new and unexpected meeting point between Mediterraneans and Nordics. In addition to Hitler, Cogni cited the leading theorists of National Socialist racism, from its predecessors, such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, to contemporary representatives such as Rosenberg. Finally, in defending the validity and effectiveness of the Nuremberg Laws, he emphasised the supposed equality between the Mediterranean and Nordic races. Indeed, in another volume titled I valori della stirpe italiana (The Values of the Italian Stock), Cogni argued that the Italian race carried with it a significant percentage of Nordic blood (Cogni Reference 76Cogni1937b).

The interpretation was completely overturned compared to the ‘pro-Mediterranean’ view, which attributed a ‘civilising’ mission to the Latins. In Cogni’s interpretation, however, the Nordic man was not necessarily embodied in the Scandinavian; he did not limit himself to it. The Nordic man was, in fact, a transversal European specimen, representative of both Mediterranean and typically northern identities. According to Cogni, figures such as Elisabetta Gonzaga and Isabella d’Este could rightly be defined as ‘Nordic’. Furthermore, drawing on the views of Günther, who also authored the preface to Cogni’s book, the list included Leonardo, Galileo, Titian, Signorelli, Manzoni, Donizetti, Alfieri, Garibaldi, and Mussolini himself. In short, an evident Nordic element could be found in both the Roman man and the Renaissance man, each possessing an ‘eagle-like’ visage (Cogni Reference 76Cogni1937b: 45).

In this way, Cogni distanced himself from the Mediterranean, cultural, and ‘civilising’ racism supported by the majority of Italian theorists and gave rise to a new form of ‘mystical’ racism, with pro-Nazi roots and much closer to that proposed by Julius Evola. In this sense, Cogni found himself in a position very similar to that of Landra. Initially, both had earned Mussolini’s esteem, who later abandoned them in favour of a line of racism that was only seemingly more moderate. In contrast, the National Socialists welcomed these Italian ‘exiles’, giving them considerable space and visibility in the second half of the 1930s. In other words, unlike their German counterparts, Italian race theorists became divided, especially in the mid-1930s. On one side were those who attempted to outline the existence of a supposedly superior Mediterranean race, or at least one equivalent to the Nordic race. On the other side, although in the minority, were scholars such as Cogni and Landra, who believed that the two races were not only compatible but even had significant common roots.

3.1 Anti-Soviet Escalation

In the Nordic countries, the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (23 August 1939) heightened fears of an imminent Soviet attack, if not an outright invasion. The Finns, in particular, felt somewhat betrayed by the Soviet–German agreement, which deprived the country of an alliance with a nation, Germany, considered a friend until that moment. In this sense, even the Italian cultural circles had mobilised, through the diplomatic channels of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Propaganda, in order to discredit the Soviet Union. All this was happening, paradoxically, in a scenario that, on the contrary, should have distanced the possibility of a conflict against Stalin.

Firstly, because Hitler had signed a sensational non-aggression pact with the Soviets, only to renounce it in 1941 with the launch of Operation Barbarossa. Secondly, because Italy would enter the war on 10 June 1940, almost a year later than its German ally, in the hope of concentrating solely on the Mediterranean area and part of the Danube-Balkan region. Lastly, an element not to be underestimated is that Italian participation on the Eastern Front would occur almost two months later than the Nazi involvement. In other words, it seemed difficult, at the beginning of autumn 1939, to imagine such a campaign of hatred against a Soviet Union that, although it was the principal political adversary of the Axis, did not yet constitute a wartime enemy. Probably, Italian fascism somehow perceived the anti-Soviet sentiment that was once again seeping through the Nordic countries and took advantage of it to ride the wave of fear sparked by that ‘Red scare’ which, back in 1917, had thrown Italy into chaos, allowing fascism to rise to power. In the spring of 1939, for example, the Italian Legation in Copenhagen confirmed the receipt of eight copies of the work La bufera: Racconto sovietico (The Storm: A Soviet Tale) by an anti-Bolshevik Belarusian writer persecuted by Stalin, Nikolaĭ Aleksandrovič Belina-Podgaetskij.Footnote ³⁰ In addition to these, the Legation had received eleven copies of the book Il Natale di Petrouchka (The Christmas of Petrouchka), written by the same author and published in the same year.Footnote ³¹ Quickly adding to these publications, twenty copies of the following volumes were received: Il Fascismo contro il comunismo (Fascism Against Communism) by Antonino Pagliaro, L’educazione sovietica by Adriana Manari, Fascismo e Bolscevismo (Fascism and Bolshevism) by Francesco Coppola, and La situazione della classe operaia nell’U.R.S.S. Tratta unicamente da documenti sovietici (The Situation of the Working Class in the U.S.S.R.: Based Solely on Soviet Documents) by Démétrius Paryczko.Footnote ³² These were mostly brief pamphlets that, nonetheless, significantly contributed to undermining not only the political but also the cultural and educational image of the Soviet Union. This Element was particularly evident in the volume by Adriana Manari, who unequivocally stated in the preface of her book (Manari Reference Manari1938: 7): ‘[…] In Russia, we find great saints and great criminals; the spiritual balance is difficult for the Russian, which contrasts with what characterises the Western Latin spirit […].’Footnote ³³

A few months later, just two weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War, on 15 September 1939, the Italian Legation in Denmark confirmed that it had received twenty copies of an anti-Bolshevik book titled Rivelazioni su Mosca (Revelations on Moscow) by Th. (or Fedor) Butenko.Footnote ³⁴ All these publications were part of a broader project that began in Florence in 1938, through a series titled Biblioteca popolare di cultura politica (Popular Library of Political Culture), published by Le Monnier and printed at the Enrico Ariani printing press. The series constituted one of the main propaganda efforts of the Fascist regime against Stalinist Bolshevism and reinforced the criticism of that old Tsarist expansionism, which, according to Fascist propaganda, the Soviet Union had merely exacerbated through Marxism (Maffei Reference Maffei2010).Footnote ³⁵ All this was happening in a country, Denmark, quite distant from the Soviet threat, not only for geographical reasons but also for political ones.

In the event of an invasion, the contest would have been played out, as it eventually was, between Germany and Great Britain, not between Hitler and Stalin, as would occur along the entire eastern front involving Poland, the Baltic states, and, above all, Finland. Until 1939, however, few Western governments considered the possibility of a Soviet invasion to be serious. Not the Finns, who, as the Italian author and journalist Franco Ciampitti wrote while travelling around the Baltic in 1939, felt the threat growing beyond the ‘red line’. For two decades, the danger had been maturing, and they knew it. On the eve of the Second World War, Ciampitti (Reference Ciampitti1940: 9) stated: ‘gli occhi erano volti al Reno, ai Balcani, alla Vistola, al Mar Nero, al Caucaso: non si pensava alla Finlandia lontana e quieta’.Footnote ³⁶ During his extensive reportage, the journalist had ventured as far as the so-called red line at Vaitolahti, which at the time was the last Finnish outpost along the border with the Soviet Union.Footnote ³⁷

Ciampitti, almost surprised by the austerity of that border, described it as follows (Ciampitti Reference Ciampitti1940: 92):

After that, the Italian journalist reiterated the mantra, now a cornerstone of Italian fascist propaganda, of Mediterranean civilisation contrasted with others, particularly the so-called Russo-Slavic one (Ciampitti Reference Ciampitti1940: 92):

Finally, he launched the implicit accusation against Bolshevism (Ciampitti Reference Ciampitti1940: 92):

Ciampitti even managed to gather a direct testimony about Finland in the early thirties and the Lapua movement. While conversing with one of his last travel companions, Captain Lauri L… (as he is referred to in the book), Ciampitti recounted his words (Ciampitti Reference Ciampitti1940: 248):

The captain went further, stating: ‘Perhaps, if the Lapua movement had possessed greater energy, today Finland would have very different barriers on the Isthmus, on Ladoga, in Karelia, and in Lapland […].’Footnote ⁴² The Finnish example is certainly not the only instance of anti-Bolshevism that was growing and entwining itself throughout all the Nordic countries. It was an ancient hatred, nurtured since the early months of the Russian Revolution, which several Nordic observers had witnessed first-hand. Among these was a young Norwegian diplomat who has become quite well-known within the pages of this study: Vidkun Quisling. Sent to Russia in March 1918 as an attaché at the Norwegian legation in Petrograd, he concluded that the Bolsheviks had gained an extraordinarily strong hold on Russian society. In this sense, Quisling’s anti-Bolshevism was the product of first-hand experience, albeit from a privileged vantage point such as that of diplomacy and the military. In addition to having studied Russian for nearly five years, starting in 1917 and under the guidance of Olaf Broch, the most prominent Norwegian Slavist, his reports from Petrograd were read with great interest in the halls of Norwegian power (Dahl Reference Dahl2008: 28–33). His growing anti-Bolshevism was fuelled by two main elements. The first was the recurring fear that the Russian Revolution could spread to the rest of the world, unleashing the rebellion of the international proletariat. The second concerned a mix of racial and political hatred prevalent in the West, according to which the Slavs, although considered biologically inferior, would use Bolshevism as a weapon to subjugate Nordic populations. In other words, it was based on an old theory of the inferiority of the Slavs, which had recently been supported by the rise of the aforementioned biological anthropology and the study of eugenics as a popular science.

During the Great War, Mjøen had warned against the ‘Mongolization of Europe’, which would have followed from the victory of the Entente and of Russia, threatening the Nordic genetic elements in Eastern Europe and the Baltic (Dahl Reference Dahl2008: 35–36). In the 1930s, the most significant decade for the development and consolidation of Quisling’s political project, anti-Bolshevism, became a cornerstone of his newly formed party, National Union, which clearly positioned itself within the community of fascism as a European phenomenon of anti-liberalism and anti-communism (Hamre Reference Hamre2019: 48). Furthermore, although anti-Bolshevism had been a core conviction since the beginning of the party, anti-liberalism gained momentum when the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations in September 1934 (Kunkeler and Hamre Reference Kunkeler and Hamre2022: 61). However, it seems that the turning point of the anti-Bolshevik escalation, at least among Norwegian fascists, occurred, probably, at the end of November 1939, when Quisling met Ulrick Noack, a reader in Nordic history at Greifswald University, at the opening of the German book fair. On that occasion, Quisling expressed a clear opinion regarding the war that had just begun between the Soviet Union and Finland. The future Norwegian dictator believed that the Finns would have been able to hold out for quite some time, provided they received a consignment of weapons from Sweden. He considered that the Soviet army had been significantly weakened by Stalin’s purges and thus its fighting capability should not be overestimated, especially not by Hitler.

Furthermore, he stated that the Soviet invasion of Finland constituted a serious political problem for the Third Reich as well. According to Quisling, the Non-Aggression Pact, however, was an error in relation to what Germany’s real mission was: to liberate Russia and the eastern region, to establish free nation-states, and to create a unified technical and economic area under German influence extending from Western Europe to the Urals (Dahl Reference Dahl2008: 146–147). But Quisling went further, suggesting to Noack the idea of a German attack plan against the Soviet Union through a rapid motorised campaign. In the event of a sudden collapse of the defences, Quisling maintained, the Soviet government would fall, and the one-party dictatorship of Stalin would come to an end. People everywhere would rise up and rebuild their nation-states, not only the Ukrainians and the Byelorussians but also the Russians, the Turks, the Uzbeks, and many more. In other words, Quisling appeared to predict Operation Barbarossa about seven months before its actual commencement. In this scenario, characterised by a war destined to last far longer than anticipated, the Nordic countries found themselves forced to endure invasions from both Hitler’s Germany in the west and Stalin’s forces in the east. Only Sweden, despite being in a diplomatically ambiguous and often precarious position, managed to maintain its neutrality intact. Nevertheless, there were no shortage of plans for subjugation, if not outright invasion, at least from the National Socialist side.

3.2 Forging Collaborationism

The phenomenon that most significantly characterised the history of the Nordic countries, or rather a part of them, during the Second World War was undoubtedly collaborationism. Similar to what occurred, for example, in France and Croatia, collaborationism played a pivotal role not only in facilitating the invasion of national territory by a foreign power but also in the establishment of regimes that were almost always devoid of any form of legitimacy. Even in the Norwegian case, despite the particular admiration of the Nazis for the Nordic populations, it seems that Quisling’s service to the Germans did not benefit the Norwegians in any way (Deák Reference Deák2015: 83–84). This is a result that, at least apparently, might seem anomalous, especially since the German Nazis were particularly eager to see the Norwegians as the idealised ‘Nordic Aryans’: tall, athletic, blond, and blue-eyed, and therefore admirably suited for interbreeding as well as participation in the massive project of the Third Reich. Furthermore, within National Socialist ideology, the Norwegians, as the bravest of warriors and sailors, represented the symbol of the Viking tradition (Deák Reference Deák2015: 68–69). In this regard, the most striking example was that of the Norwegian writer Per Imerslund, a living embodiment of the genius artist and, at the same time, the heroic fighter possessing all the canonical traits of Aryan beauty (Emberland and Rougthvedt Reference Emberland and Rougthvedt2004). The Nazi Weltanschauung, however, also placed the Danes, like the Norwegians, in the same racial category. Nonetheless, the Norwegian people put up a brief but valiant resistance to the German invasion, particularly thanks to military assistance from Britain, France, and Poland. This, on the other hand, did not happen in Denmark, where the government and the Crown surrendered without firing a shot. Furthermore, while the Norwegian king Haakon VII and his government fled to Great Britain, and only the Norwegian army capitulated, King Christian X of Denmark immediately signed the surrender document.

The government, parliament, and every single state and municipal institution continued to function (Deák Reference Deák2015: 68–69). Thus, while the Norwegians were subjected to the arbitrary rule of a German high commissioner, Josef Terboven, assisted by the self-appointed prime minister Quisling, the Danes were allowed to preserve their own system of government and their laws, a prime example of accommodation with the occupier that paid immediate dividends. Moreover, while occupied Norway was run by native civil servants under close German supervision, Denmark continued under its old form of government, and, in March 1943, it was even permitted to hold fair and open parliamentary elections. In Norway, relations between occupiers and the occupied were rather tense from the beginning; in Denmark, near-ideal conditions prevailed for the Germans who were fortunate enough to be stationed there.

Finally, although in both Norway and Denmark there were thousands of collaborators as well as volunteers for the SS, only in Denmark did the government become an official ally of Nazi Germany: in November 1941, the Danish government entered the so-called Anti-Comintern Pact, whose goal was to destroy the Soviet Union and communism. Moreover, the Danish government outlawed the Communist Party and arrested many of its militants (Deák Reference Deák2015: 68–69). Although complex and still little studied outside Scandinavia, the structure of Nordic collaborationism now appears to be quite observable from various perspectives. Firstly, there is an internal distinction, namely between Danish and Norwegian collaborationism. In this regard, it is not merely a geographic difference but a significant cultural, historical, and political factor. Secondly, in the Norwegian case, there was an initial intervention, albeit ineffective, by foreign forces in defence of national territorial integrity from an anti-German perspective. Finally, an important factor not to be overlooked is that Nordic collaborationism was part of a much broader scientific (or ostensibly scientific) project based on the principle of the superiority of the Germanic race, particularly in the context of eugenics. As is easy to gather, we are no longer confronted with a phenomenon that can be explained solely through national historiographical analysis or, at most, regional. Collaborationism, although distinct according to its various geographical contexts, also became a transnational phenomenon that involved various governments, movements, and political parties. In the past decade, indeed, thanks to the contributions of a new generation of scholars, the discussion surrounding the emergence of various forms of collaborationism and the roles of their respective interpreters has seen a significant revival of interest (Miljan Reference Miljan2018; Millington Reference Millington2020). However, without the previous insights of prominent historians, this discourse would likely have remained limited to individual national contexts and would have lacked a broader European perspective (Paxton Reference Paxton1972; Ory Reference Ory1976). Furthermore, French historians have suggested a distinction between ‘collaboration’ and ‘collaborationism’, noting that Pétain represents the former and Quisling the latter. Durand, for instance, argues that the spirit of collaboration energises traditional sociopolitical forces and movements, which were often in power even before the war. In contrast, the collaborationist spirit is described by the French scholar as something that belongs to fascist minorities. However, as he himself emphasises, the two phenomena cannot be opposed absolutely, as there are no clear boundaries between them (Durand Reference Durand2002: 10). In this regard, Quisling’s collaborationism manifests as the evolution and final product of a minority – the fascist minority – that emerged within a country, Norway, firmly anchored in the democratic and liberal values of parliamentarianism. Similarly, Italian fascism was born as a minority in 1919, with the aim of rapidly dismantling the structures of a weak liberal state that was likely on the verge of a Bolshevik-inspired revolution.

This political weakness of the liberal-democratic state, not only in Italy but also in many other European countries, was one of the main and tragic consequences of the First World War, which left a severe economic and social crisis affecting all nations, both victors and vanquished. This occurred, paradoxically, even in countries such as Denmark and Norway, which had remained neutral during the conflict. However, as seen in previous sections, the spread of fascism and National Socialism in the Nordic countries remained limited to groups and organisations of militants who, in various ways, attempted to destabilise democratic institutions through acts of emulation, sometimes even spectacular, but never succeeded in gaining power. In this regard, a military occupation by Hitler’s Germany was necessary to implement all those fervent preparations for collaborationism that had animated the Nordic fascist and Nazi sympathisers up until that fateful April of 1940.

3.3 Collaborators and ‘Pre-collaborators’

Collaborationism was the phenomenon that, in the early 1940s, most strongly linked Norway and Denmark to fascism and National Socialism. In this regard, however, the Norwegian and Danish cases do not appear similar from the outset, especially in light of what occurred in Denmark in the early 1920s. Indeed, although the Danish case is also regarded as one of the prime examples of collaborationism, there were still irreparable fractures between Danish nationalists and their German counterparts. One of these was the region of Schleswig-Holstein, which, since the plebiscite of 1920, has represented a fault line not only politically but also culturally between Denmark and Germany.

After the First World War, Denmark had indeed only obtained the northern part of the region through a plebiscite. The central area, however, had been assigned to Germany, as had the southern part, which remained German. Consequently, the area became a constant source of irredentism and Nordic nationalism. Furthermore, it is worth noting that, unlike his brother Haakon VII, King of Norway, Christian X of Denmark did not leave the country during the German occupation. In other words, the King of Denmark and Iceland, along with the now weakened army of his kingdom, did not attempt to resist the Wehrmacht (Nissen Reference Nissen1983: 92–97). However, although Denmark and Norway were invaded simultaneously, it is necessary to separate the two cases, both from a military and a political perspective. One of the most representative figures of Danish nationalism between the wars, for example, was the anti-communist and anti-democratic gymnast Niels Bukh. Initially a sympathiser of Mussolini, from the mid-1930s, Bukh began to align himself with Hitler’s ideas. As previously analysed, in Denmark, Italian fascism had not garnered particular interest, while National Socialism, since the Macthübernahme, had elicited considerable admiration among far-right circles and several Danish nationalists (Christensen Reference Christensen2022).

The Danish National Socialist Workers’ Party (Danish: Danmarks national-socialistiske Arbejder-Parti) was founded in 1930, but the two leaders who took turns at the helm of the party (Cay Lembcke first and Frits Clausen later) were unable to reconcile Danish nationalism (traditionally anti-German) with the spirit of collaborationism that the local far right could have developed in the face of the approaching National Socialist invasion (Bonde Reference Bonde2009b, Reference Bonde2009c). Quisling, on the other hand, universally represents the archetype of the traitor, and Norwegian collaborationism is a specific example of national betrayal. This view has become well established in Norwegian historiography, but it has also been supported by other historians who, based on sources from the time, have demonstrated that even the Swedish far right considered Quisling to be a traitor to the homeland, guilty of having opened the doors to a foreign occupying force (Berggren Reference Berggren2002: 403–405). Mussolini himself, in 1944, lamented that he was now regarded as no better than any ordinary Quisling (Franzinelli Reference Franzinelli2012: 58–59) due to the newly established Italian Social Republic, which represented a puppet state created ad hoc by the German occupiers to control northern Italy and continue the war. As if that were not enough, less than a year earlier, in a dispatch sent from Rome to Berlin on 18 September 1943, Herbert Kappler remarked about the reaction of the Romans to news of Mussolini’s re-establishment of the Fascist Party and a new government: the population is sceptical and does not expect anything good from this ‘Quisling government’. Ironically, the very puppet government of Norway under Quisling, lacking international recognition, could not even ‘recognise’ the new government of Mussolini leading the Italian Social Republic (Franzinelli Reference Franzinelli2012: 15). However, it would be erroneous to limit Norwegian collaborationism and, more generally, Nordic collaborationism to the figure of Quisling. Lesser-known figures internationally, such as Albert Hagelin, Hans Jacobsen, and Carl Lie, significantly facilitated the penetration of German National Socialism in Norway through the economy, culture, and information. Hagelin, for example, was the businessman who promoted the economic infiltration of Germans into Norway (Dahl Reference Dahl2015). Jacobsen was the driving force behind Ragnarok while Carl Lie, the publisher of the first Norwegian national socialist newspaper, Ekstrabladet, attempted to introduce National Socialism in Norway as early as the first half of the 1930s. Adolf Hoel was a Norwegian geologist and explorer who, in 1933 joined Quisling’s National Union, and during the German occupation of Norway he was rector of the University of Oslo (Drivenes and Jølle Reference Drivenes and Jølle2007). Finally, as has been widely examined, the contribution of figures such as Gran favoured a gradual rapprochement between fascisms, first directly between Italy and Norway and, subsequently, mediated, if not conditioned and co-opted, by German National Socialism. Although this is not the place to list and, above all, analyse the most prominent figures of Norwegian collaborationism, it is important to emphasise its diversity in terms of profession, generation, and social background.

Norwegian collaborationism became a cross-cutting phenomenon, ranging from the more affluent circles of the economy, as exemplified by Hagelin, to the more prestigious realms of science and academia, as seen in the case of Hoel, and even extending to the highest ranks of the air force, as demonstrated by the relationships between Gran and the Axis powers. Furthermore, regarding the contacts with Mussolini’s fascism, it is important to note that in the second half of the 1930s, relations between Italy and Norway grew primarily in the commercial, food, technological, and scientific sectors. Italy emerged as Norway’s primary buyer in the cod fish trade, including its varieties such as baccalà, stockfish, and dried fish, consuming the entirety of Norway’s production of these items.

Additionally, Italy imported cellulose, cod liver oil, newsprint, copper, nickel, chromium, and hides and furs, as well as whale oil from Norway. Conversely, Italy exported goods to Norway, including salt, bran, citrus fruits, walnut flour, almonds, hazelnuts, tomato paste, linen textiles, wool, jute and canvas, artificial silk, hats, tyres, and cars (Miscali Reference Miscali2021a, Reference Miscali2021b; Ferrarini Reference Ferrarini2023). Soon, this fruitful trade expanded to include new and more sophisticated sectors, such as civil and military technology. For instance, in 1934, the Norwegian navy acquired a seaplane manufactured by the Italian company Breda (Miscali Reference Miscali2021a: 196). The situation, however, deteriorated in late 1935 when the League of Nations condemned the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and imposed economic sanctions that lasted from 18 November 1935 to 14 July 1936. Although Norway aligned with the League of Nations, it experienced significant economic repercussions. The situation returned to normal after a year-long crisis, and commercial relations once again flourished, particularly in the technological sector. In 1937, for example, Italy was invited, along with many other countries, to participate in the first International Polar Exhibition (Norwegian: Internasjonal utstilling for polarforskning), which was planned to be held in Bergen (Norway) from May 1940. During the negotiations, several of the most important figures of Mussolini’s regime were involved, particularly Antonio Larocca, chief of Bari’s Fiera del Levante, who was also a brilliant entrepreneur, especially in the food sector (Ferrarini Reference Ferrarini2023). In the same year, Giovanni Amadori, the Italian plenipotentiary in Norway, sent a very detailed report to Rome concerning the developments of Norwegian neutrality and, more generally, Nordic neutrality.Footnote ⁴³ The diplomat reported that Norwegian neutrality, after being consistent with the principles of the League of Nations for many years, was changing its direction. Moving away from the principle of collective security that was characteristic of the League, Norway was pursuing autonomous policies aimed at avoiding involvement in a potential conflict while safeguarding its neutrality on one hand and observing the actions of the great powers on the other.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to Amadori, this attitude was outside the spirit of the League of Nations, if not even in opposition to it. In other words, it seemed that Norway not only doubted the League of Nations’ ability to maintain peace – for example, through the imposition of economic sanctions (considered harmful) and military actions (deemed dangerous) – but also believed in the real possibility that great powers, such as Germany, Britain, and the Soviet Union, could at any moment undermine the neutrality of Norway and other Nordic countries.Footnote ⁴⁵ In this regard, Norwegian neutrality appeared politically cross-party, as emerged from the words of the former Liberal Prime Minister Johan Ludwig Mowinckel in a speech on 30 April 1937 before the parliament (Norwegian: Stortinget), and the remarks made the following day by the sitting Prime Minister, the Labour politician Johan Nygaardsvold. While the former hoped for the implementation of what had been established at the recent Helsinki conference on the neutrality of Nordic states in the event of war, the latter emphasised the necessity of ‘total, unconditional, and absolute neutrality’ aimed at safeguarding Norway and the other Nordic countries from war.Footnote ⁴⁶ Despite this explicit political stance, the Nordic far right, particularly in Norway, stoked the fires of militarism by advocating, as had been a recurring theme for many years, the need to unleash Arctic imperialism, not only to create their own ‘Lebensraum’ but also in anticipation of possible attacks from the great powers. In this context, Arctic imperialism constituted a highly prevalent topic in the political and cultural circles of the time. Even renowned Norwegian authors of international acclaim, such as the Nobel Prize for Literature winner Knut Hamsun, endorsed its validity and legitimacy. Quisling, Jacobsen, and the journalists from Ragnarok passionately supported the necessity for Norwegian expansion towards the remote fringes of the globe, in Greenland and beyond. Considering the immense food and energy resources available in those areas (e.g. whaling), competition with other major Nordic powers, including Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Great Britain, and later the United States, would not have seemed at all unreasonable, both then and now. The concept of a Greater Norway, capable of depriving Denmark of control over Greenland, had already been proposed during the 1920s and gained further momentum until the mid-1930s. From that point on, Quisling even aspired to promote the ambitious yet utopian idea of making Norway a cultural and political bridge, an international mediator between Germany and Great Britain. It is also worth noting that, on 7 May 1926, Umberto Nobile arrived at the Svalbard Islands to fly over (for the first time) the North Pole.

The tragic incident that linked Italy and Norway two years later, characterised by the survival of Umberto Nobile and the disappearance of Roald Amundsen, demonstrated that, in reality, the two countries were gradually drawing closer together, despite the considerable geographic distance (Aas Reference Aas2003; Zani Reference Zani2003; Ferrarini Reference Ferrarini2023; Alfei Reference Alfei2025). In this sense, Mussolini was even accused, particularly by the left-wing Norwegian press, of harbouring expansionist ambitions in the Arctic through polar explorations, prioritising the needs of nationalism over those of scientific exploration (Aas Reference Aas2003: 182). It is no mystery that the Duce, in pursuing a policy of international maritime supremacy, had long been engaged in a struggle with the French fleet and, above all, with the British fleet, which was particularly active in the Northern waters. All these factors, therefore, contribute to reinforcing the thesis that the genesis of collaborationism in Norway began at least in the mid-1930s, when Quisling, in pursuit of an ambitious career, had to choose between courting Mussolini and courting Hitler. The matter, however, intersects with the much broader and well-examined theme of the ‘fascist international’ of Montreux when the Italo-German competition had intensified around the issue of race. By aligning closely with Mussolini, Quisling realised that Hitler would be willing to raise the stakes. Thus, the future Norwegian dictator challenged the dogma that the copyright of fascism (both national and international) exclusively belonged to Benito Mussolini. Just a few years later, when the invasion of Scandinavia began, on 9 April 1940, Quisling attempted a coup supported by German forces. However, the Norwegian king did not recognise Quisling’s government, and a few days later, Joseph Terboven was appointed Reichskommissar by Hitler. Thus, on June 7, Haakon VII and the royal family were forced to leave Norway and seek refuge in Great Britain, where they continued the resistance against Hitler and the Norwegian collaborators.

4.1 The ‘never-ending story’

The spread and establishment of fascism were also accentuated by the effect of broader and more complex phenomena, often outside the Italian borders within which fascism was born. This refers, for example, to the Spanish Civil War, which had a decisive impact on the growth of an anti-Bolshevik front – the fascist one – which, although not perfectly cohesive, proved to be transnational from the very beginning. In the case of the Nordic countries, the Spanish Civil War significantly influenced not only Norwegian foreign policy and press, which had always been very interested in the events that brought Franco to power, but also the consolidation of the various local far-right movements. For example, through the field experiences of figures such as Imerslund, a volunteer in Spain, and Gran, a special correspondent on the front, Nordic far-right activists and organisations had the opportunity to closely observe another form of Mediterranean fascism, the Spanish version, strongly linked to its Italian and German counterparts but, at the same time, the result of unique historical, political, and social dynamics. In other words, in Norway, as in the rest of the Nordic countries, variations of transnational fascism spread, which for a significant time managed to unite, through an imaginary line, the extreme North with Southern Europe under the banner of a single, albeit unachievable, fascist international or, if one prefers, international of fascisms. However, despite the flood of rhetoric typical of Mussolini’s regime, there was a lack of organisational unity and coordination of objectives. The failure of the Caur is one such example, albeit not the only one.

The Montreux Congress serves as a metaphor for the inability of Italian fascism to assert itself over other fascisms, and this – perhaps more from a methodological than an ideological standpoint – demonstrates the importance of studying the fascist phenomenon today, just as then, as something transnational, fluid, flexible, and not, as has often been the case, rigid and standardised, constantly seeking supposed dogmas or pillars upon which to base international fascism. German National Socialism, however, also fell into this error, limiting itself to surpassing and replacing Italian fascism in its attempt to impose itself, even in the Nordic countries, as a univocal model to be followed, imitated, and assimilated. This may be one reason why, alongside the different choices made in response to the outbreak of the Second World War (collaborationism, neutrality, alliance), Nordic fascism never constituted a heterogeneous and cohesive front, nor was it even remotely capable or interested in reworking, in whole or in part, crucial principles of Italian fascism such as corporatism. On the contrary, the trend was to maintain the various local fascisms as separate or, in any case, adapted to national needs. In this sense, some characteristics of both Italian fascism and German National Socialism were transnational, such as racism, white supremacy, and antisemitism, but no true Nordic criteria capable of transitioning to the transnational level emerged. This was because each country found itself in different political conditions. On the eve of the Second World War, the relationship between Italian fascism and the Nordic varieties underwent profound changes. These relationships, overshadowed by the growing ideological influence of National Socialism, loosened almost to the point of disappearing. Mussolini’s fascism was relegated to a secondary position, considered less dangerous, particularly in light of Italy’s lesser military power and perhaps a less pronounced, and possibly more ambiguous, European hegemonic ambition (except for the Mediterranean and the Balkan regions) compared to that of Hitler’s Germany (Braskén et al. Reference Braskén, Copsey and Lundin2019; Braskén Reference 65Braskén, Braskén, Copsey and Featherstone2021). In response to this decline in popularity, Italian fascism failed to react in any meaningful way, apart from futile attempts such as the establishment of the Caur and the enhancement, mostly in economic rather than strategic terms, of its cultural propaganda in the Nordic countries. In this regard, the impact of the war on the Nordic countries had a far more disruptive effect on Italy and fascism than historiography has emphasised thus far. The Nordic countries do not, whether in the past or today, constitute a peripheral or marginal zone of international geopolitics. In this respect, the role of the Arctic during the Cold War would be a touchstone for how the history of anti-communism would not only continue but would also extend to countries like the United States and Britain, which, until 1945, viewed the Nazi-fascist enemy as the greatest global threat. In this sense, it can be said that the main antagonist of Nordic neutralism was precisely ‘pre-collaborationism’, which was undoubtedly decisive in Denmark and Norway and found some form of expression in the anti-Soviet alliance between Finland and Germany.

Italy, in any case, remained the weak link of the Axis, remaining excluded, while suffering the political, cultural, and military preponderance of Germany even in the Nordic countries. This does not mean, however, that Italian fascism did not leave a tragic memory of connivance and complicity with the Nazi occupier during the years of conflict. But this, as may be seen in another study, is a different story characterised by a laborious political, cultural, and diplomatic reconstruction of relations between Italy and Scandinavia starting from the post-war years.

Today, unlike over a hundred years ago, we know much about fascism and its nature. But are we able to recognise it in its various and multifaceted reincarnations? Now we are aware that fascism was not (and is not) a rigid, entirely dogmatic, and cumbersome phenomenon. Rather, these characteristics belonged to the various regimes and dictatorships that, at different times, have utilised and applied the principles of fascism to obtain and maintain power. Fascism itself, as a political, social, and cultural phenomenon, represents something different, more aligned with the extreme impulses of human beings, who have always struggled for survival and, if possible, for supremacy over their peers and other species. In this sense, fascism carries with it and seeks scientific justification in some form of Darwinism (Paxton Reference Paxton1998, Reference Paxton2004), which, although elementary and at times superficial, still proves capable of taking root under numerous forms of discrimination and exploitation of human beings. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain how, more than a century after its emergence, it not only continues to be studied and explored but is even historically, politically, and culturally rehabilitated, perhaps without ever purging it (if that were ever possible) of its worst aspects, resurrecting it from the past as an innovative response to the challenges and problems of the present.

In short, the picture is now clear. Anti-Bolshevism was a binding element, perhaps the most important and reasonable one among the fascisms of the South and those of the North, a transnational phenomenon much more politically adaptable and psychologically propagable than fascism itself. Therefore, it is hoped that this volume can constitute a first, albeit small, step towards a much broader debate not only on the history of transnational fascism but also, and most importantly, on the history of transnational neofascism – that is, what has survived, been reborn, or never died from the ashes of an alliance, namely the Italo-German one, that would alter the world order for many decades to follow, far beyond the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.