How do the police act under fascist regimes?
Executive summary
Police under fascist regimes often shift from instruments of impartial law enforcement into organized tools of political repression: they collaborate with or are subsumed by state security organs to surveil, intimidate, and eliminate opponents, while sometimes retaining elements of pre‑existing police culture that produce uneven loyalties and behavior [1] [2] [3]. Historians find common patterns—cooperation with paramilitaries, expansion of secret police, legalized impunity for violent suppression—but also important differences between countries and moments that shape whether police actively enable terror or merely acquiesce [1] [4].
1. How the institutional architecture is remade to serve the regime
Fascist regimes typically remodel policing by creating or empowering special political security organs—secret police and tribunals—that target enemies of the state and enforce ideological conformity, as Italy’s OVRA and special tribunals demonstrate in practice [5]. Comparative studies of Italy, Germany and Spain show that regimes either grafted fascist control onto existing forces or built parallel security apparatuses, producing systems optimized for political repression rather than ordinary crime control [1] [4].
2. Everyday practices: surveillance, repression, and the normalization of violence
On the ground, policing under fascism involves intensified surveillance, political policing, and often legalized violence: arrest, exile, show trials, and coordination with paramilitary squads were routine tools in Mussolini’s Italy and the Nazi state to break opposition and terrorize civil society [5] [2] [4]. Scholars emphasize that terror was used selectively—aimed at opponents defined by the regime’s enemies list—so police violence was a political instrument shaped by ideology and state priorities [1] [4].
3. Personnel, culture, and the question of complicity
Police behavior in fascist transitions depends heavily on institutional culture, career incentives, and the composition of forces: many historians argue that ordinary policemen were not monolithic ideologues but responded to broken morale, weak loyalty to liberal institutions, and career incentives that pushed them toward collaboration or passivity; in Italy these dynamics help explain how a liberal policing system could be “fascistized” over time [3] [6] [2]. Conversely, other cases show active recruitment of ideologically committed personnel and close ties to paramilitaries, producing more deliberate brutality [1] [4].
4. The gray zones: cooperation with militias, selective enforcement, and moral suasion
A recurring pattern is ambivalence and variation: police sometimes protected fascist militants or let them act with impunity while cracking down harshly on leftists and minorities, creating a de facto alliance between state forces and street paramilitaries without formal merger [7] [8] [9]. Modern debates reflect similar tensions—some observers stress systemic affinity between police and right‑wing movements, while others note periods of antagonism or federal interventions that complicate simple “cops = fascists” narratives [9] [10].
5. Propaganda, legal cover, and the erosion of accountability
Fascist governments often rewrote laws, invoked emergency powers, and used propaganda to legitimate expanded police powers and silence critics, conditioning public tolerance for abuses by framing repression as protection against crime, chaos, or enemies [11] [4]. The result is institutionalized impunity—special courts, exile, administrative detention—that makes redress difficult and embeds the police into the regime’s machinery of control [5] [2].
6. Lessons and caveats for interpretation
History shows consistent mechanisms—secret police, politicized enforcement, cooperation with militias, selective terror—but also important cross‑national variation and contingencies: pre‑existing police structures, local loyalties, and political calculations shape whether police become enthusiastic agents of fascism, reluctant enablers, or fractured institutions with mixed behavior [1] [7] [6]. Scholarship cited here warns against deterministic readings: police can be a crucible for authoritarianism, yet outcomes depend on institutional choices, personnel, and the broader political context [10] [3].