Building Ideological Bridges and Inventing Institutional Traditions: Festivities and Commemorative Rituals in the Fascist and Nazi Police

This article analyses the employment of rituals of celebration and commemoration to ideologically and culturally bind police forces to the fascist and Nazi dictatorships. It considers public festivities such as ?police day? (Festa della Polizia/Tag der deutschen Polizei) as instruments for demonstrating the professional and political integration of the police into the fascist/Nazi regimes, in the broader context of the staging by these regimes of highly aestheticized rituals to reinforce the national community. Police rituals, notably those involving the commemoration of ?martyrs?, were also employed with the intention of bringing together policemen and fascists/Nazis, by claiming that they shared common values and formative experience. While the ideological success of these rituals is questioned, the article argues that police institutions often willingly participated in them to ensure their occupation of public space and high standing in the eyes of their political masters. The article illustrates the importance of bringing cultural approaches to the study of police history and underlines the need for a more thorough comparison between the police forces of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.