Preliminary Programme

While it is recognized that the Italian police adapted themselves with ease to the practical requirements of the Mussolinian dictatorship, the extent to which they underwent a deeper process of ‘fascistization’ involving, for example, ideological training, is less certain. Archive documents, such as the contents of personal files, rarely refer in detail to the relationship between policemen and fascist ideology. This paper will examine how police literature (journals, training manuals, textbooks, etc.) represented both the fascist regime and the role that the police were to play in Mussolini’s new social order. This will be done in order to ascertain the level of ideological engagement with fascism among police leaders and consider the extent to which police training programmes, drills and rituals underwent a process of ‘fascistization’. (Show less)

Men joining English borough police forces typically had no clear idea what kind of job they were in for. Most held the common working-class perception that police constables were paid a regular wage for walking around doing little more than keeping their eyes open and collaring drunks. Their formal training promoted the official image of policemen as neutral upholders of law and order. Where recruits learned the realities of policing was from experienced police officers. Successful policemen took their duty of protecting the public seriously but they learned to carry it out based on experiences in the streets rather than on romantic imagery or working-class misperceptions. (Show less)

This paper focuses on the involvement of the German police in state representation and in the protection of state symbols from the mid 1920s to the mid 1930s. Both state forms, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi dictatorship, aimed at presenting the police as an important part of state authority. The republic emphasized its crucial role as a pillar of the new democracy. By the mid 1920s, however, public militarization of society made the representation of the police as a republican bulwark a difficult task. The republican state was symbolized not by a policeman, but rather by a uniformed member of a republican war veterans’ organization. Before 1933 the Nazis had pictured the police as an opponent protecting the despised republican democracy. After their seizure of power, they had to include the police force in their new system as well as in Nazi representation and rhetoric. Rather than competition, as in the republic, the structure of the Nazi state itself made the representation of the police as a fundamental part of the state problematic. (Show less)