Beyond 'Consent' or 'Terror': Wartime Crises in Nazi Germany

In the days following Mussolini's fall from power on 25 July 1943 his military successor, Marshal Badoglio, became almost popular in Germany. Predictably enough, Italian civilian workers in German cities broke into 'tears of joy' and spontaneous celebrations, and, according to the secret police, 'even Fascists declared that for all his political achievements, the Duce had failed militarily'. In Breslau and other cities French prisoners of war drank and sang late into the night and refused to turn up for work next day. But Germans too were caught up in the mood of change, scanning the newspapers and airwaves for the - at first - very scant information on the momentous change in regime engulfing their closest ally. Many noted a minor item which reported the banning of the Fascist Party. If this could occur overnight after twenty years in power in Italy, then, people were quoted as saying quite openly, 'National Socialism could be got rid of even more quickly after a ten-year rule'.¹

Party members were so often abused in public and threatened with imminent settling of scores, especially in cities which had been recently bombed, that in the ensuing weeks many stopped wearing their uniforms and party badges in public altogether. A rash of new jokes paid tribute to their sense of fright, such as the mock classified ad: 'Golden Party badge for seven league boots'. According to the weekly confidential reports on 'popular sentiment' compiled by the Security Service of the SS, across Germany the idea was rapidly gaining ground in early August that a military dictatorship offered Germany too 'the best', or possibly even 'the last', chance of reaching a 'separate peace' with the western Allies. The fact that Badoglio had hastened to announce that the war would continue and confirmed the alliance with Germany also calmed popular anxieties about an imminent Italian 'betrayal'. In Braunschweig, two women at the weekly vegetable market were heard complaining noisily about the complete failure of German promises to retaliate against Britain for the bombing of German cities, when a group of railway workers standing nearby joined in, calling out loudly, 'Of course there's a way, our regime has got to go. We have to have a new government.'

This was an unprecedented crisis. It was also, as it turned out, a brief interlude. A month later, on 8 September 1943, the associations with Badoglio's name changed unalterably in Germany, when news of Italy's armistice with the Allies became public. Twenty Wehrmacht divisions completed the German occupation of the peninsula, while the Marshal and the King of Italy fled south from Rome to the protection of the British and Americans. A million Italian soldiers were swiftly 'interned' by their former German allies, 710,000 of whom were sent back to the Reich. There they found themselves catapulted down to the bottom of the hierarchy of foreign workers, and, like Red Army prisoners, were denied prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Conventions. Their appalling treatment was accompanied by the universal German nickname of 'Badoglios', traitors. This complete eclipse of Germans' favourable views of Italy's change of regime just a few weeks earlier was matched by an end to loose talk of replacing Hitler and the NSDAP.²

Tim Mason famously pointed out that the Nazi regime was unique in the Second World War in achieving 'total defeat'. It fought on until its capital city fell and Hitler, Goebbels and Bormann committed suicide. The surprising element in this history is not that Hitler wanted at all costs to avoid capitulation, but rather that his regime was able to expend and exhaust all the moral and physical reserves of German society in the process. Badoglio's all too brief popularity in Nazi Germany is more than a curious footnote to its wartime history. Those few weeks when anything seemed possible reveal far more about the ties that bound government and society to one another than is visible in more stable phases. The two most influential approaches to understanding this relationship share a common emphasis on social consent and state coercion as...