Fascism Total German losses in the month-long campaign were 8,100 killed and 32,000 wounded or missing The Red Army lost 2,600 killed, wounded, or missing The Poles lost 70,000 killed and 130,000 wounded, with 420,000 prisoners taken by the Germans and 240,000 more falling into Soviet captivity Hundreds of thousands of Poles escaped to fight and kill Germans another day, in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, at Falaise in Normandy, and even inside Germany itself In 1941 many tens of thousands of Polish prisoners still held in Red Army camps would be freed to join all-Polish or Soviet units to kill Germans on the Eastern Front Most were later allowed to leave the Soviet Union to fight instead under command of the British However, about 20,000 Polish officers captured by the Red Army were instead murdered in early 1940 at three different sites in the Soviet Union, the most famous of which was in Katyn forest outside Smolensk Many thousands of other Polish resisters died in Gestapo torture cells Even more—six million Poles died before it was all over—were shot by Wehrmacht execution details and Einsatzgruppen murder squads, as the long dark night of Nazi occupation settled over a benighted and immiserated land See also Czechoslovakia; Hungary; Lithuania; unconditional surrender Suggested Reading: Richard Hargreaves, Blitzkrieg Unleashed (1988); Robert Kennedy, The German Campaign in Poland, 1939 (1956); Alexander Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (2003); S Zaloga, The Polish Campaign (1985) FAR EAST COMMAND See Manchurian offensive operation (August 1945); Stavka FARUK I (1920–1965) See Egypt FASCISM The term derives from the “fasces,” a sheaf of rods carried as a symbol of office by Roman consuls, which was adopted as a symbol by the radical, antidemocratic movement that brought Benito Mussolini to power in Italy in 1922 From this exemplar, in common discourse “fascism” is also applied to Nazism, which surpassed the Italian variety in radicalism and depravity It is also used in reference to only very roughly comparable mid-20th-century movements in Croatia, Rumania, Spain, and on a smaller scale across Nazi-occupied Europe Burma, China, India, and Japan had “fascist” movements and parties as well, in a broad sense Milder variants spread to Latin America There were small fascist movements in Great Britain, Ireland, and even a “greyshirt” movement in Iceland It is almost impossible to pin down the “essence” of fascism In general, it was a romantic ideology that looked to obliterate traditional arguments of left and right by upholding veneration of a sacralized state or nation, or people, as in the concept of Volksdeutsche In that regard, fascism has been identified by scholars as partly a response to a broad decline in formal religious belief throughout the West and an attempt to substitute for traditional faith a new civic religion; 373