ABSTRACT
Any measurement of consensus in a regime built on repression of dissent and on political violence as an acceptable means of resolving disputes is problematic at best. Josef Goebbels’s reputation as a master of the art of propaganda has given the impression that the Germans had been reduced to passive recipients of material produced by the regime. But we have now come to understand that the situation was more complex. The gap between the purported Fascist and Nazi revolutions and what actually took place in the towns and countryside was great.1 Neither regime had sufficient time to overcome the resistance of long-established institutions to their totalizing ambitions. Fascist and Nazi populism and the ideal of a national or racial community were intended to bridge the gap and, over the long term, to create a new social reality, but that order had not been achieved by the outbreak of the Second World War, although it went further in Nazi Germany than in Fascist Italy.
