IF one believes that Germany’s economy is no longer capitalistic under National Socialism, it is easy to believe further that her society has become classless. This is the thesis of the late Emil Lederer.1 A brief analysis of his book will serve to introduce our discussion of the new German society.
Lederer rejects attempts to define National Socialism as the last line of defense of capitalism, as the rule of the strong man, as the revolt of the middle classes, as domination by the army, or as the ascendency of the untalented. For him, it is a ‘modern political system which rests on amorphous masses.’ It is the masses ‘which sweep the dictator into power and keep him there’ (page 18). The masses are therefore the actors, not the tools of a ruling class.
But who are the masses? They are the opposite of classes. They can be united solely by emotions (page 31); they tend to ‘burst into sudden action’ (page 38), and being amorphous, they must be integrated by a leader who can articulate their emotions (page 39). As the very opposite of classes, the masses make up a classless society. The policy of National Socialism is to transfer a class-stratified society into masses by keeping the latter in a state of perpetual tension (page 105). Since the regime must also satisfy the material demands of the masses, it goes in for large-scale public spending and thus achieves full employment. National Socialism realizes that ‘people are filled with envy, with hatred for the rich and successful’ (pages 110-11). The emotions can best be kept alive in the field of foreign affairs; for an aggressive foreign policy and preparation for foreign war prevent ‘the reawakening of thinking and of articulation into social groups’ (page 123).
National Socialist society is thus composed of the ruling party and the amorphous masses (page 127). All other distinctions are removed. ‘It is on this psychological basis that the Fascist party has been built up. With their success they attract active mass-men who then are kept in a state of emotion and cannot return to their former ways of life. Even family cohesion is broken, the pulverization of society is complete. Masses make dictators, and dictators make masses the continuing basis of the state’ (page 131). That is why the social stratification of society is of the utmost importance and why the Marxist theory of a classless society becomes so dangerous (page 138). National Socialism has completely destroyed the power of social groups and has established a classless society.
Were Lederer’s analysis correct our earlier discussion would be completely wrong. Social imperialism would then be not a device to ensnare the masses but an articulation of the spontaneous longing of the masses. Racism would not be the concern of small groups alone but would be deeply imbedded in the masses. Leadership adoration would be a genuine semi-religious phenomenon and not merely a device to prevent insight into the operation of the social-economic mechanism. Capitalism, finally, would be dead, since all particular groups have been destroyed and only leaders and masses remain.
Lederer is wrong, however, though a little of the truth sifts into some of his formulations. Occasionally one feels that even he realizes that the so-called spontaneity of the masses and their active participation in National Socialism are a sham and that the role of the people is merely to serve as an instrument of the ruling group. The problem is perhaps the most difficult of all in an analysis of National Socialism. The difficulties lie not only in the paucity of information and the inadequacy of the sociological categories but also in the extraordinarily complicated character of the social relations themselves. Class structure and social differentiation are not identical—failure to recognize this point is the basic error underlying Lederer’s analysis. A society may be divided into classes and yet not be socially differentiated in any other way. On the other hand, a classless society may have sharp differentiations.2
The essence of National Socialist social policy consists in the acceptance and strengthening of the prevailing class character of German society, in the attempted consolidation of its ruling class, in the atomization of the subordinate strata through the destruction of every autonomous group mediating between them and the state, in the creation of a system of autocratic bureaucracies interfering in all human relations. The process of atomization extends even to the ruling class in part. It goes hand in hand with a process of differentiation within the mass party and within society that creates reliable élites in every sector. Through these élites, the regime plays off one group against the other and enables a minority to terrorize the majority.3
National Socialism did not create the mass-men; it has completed the process, however, and destroyed every institution that might interfere. Basically, the transformation of men into mass-men is the outcome of modern industrial capitalism and of mass democracy. More than a century ago the French counter-revolutionaries, de Maistre and Bonald, and the Spaniard Donoso Cortes,* asserted that liberalism, Protestantism, and democracy, which they hated, bore the seeds of the emotionally motivated mass-man and would eventually give birth to the dictatorship of the sword. Mass democracy and monopoly capitalism have brought the seeds to fruition. They have imprisoned man in a network of semi-authoritarian organizations controlling his life from birth to death, and they have begun to transform culture into propaganda and salable commodities.
National Socialism claims to have stopped this trend and to have created a society differentiated not by classes but according to occupation and training. That is absolutely untrue. In fact, National Socialism has carried to its highest perfection the very development it pretends to attack. It has annihilated every institution that under democratic conditions still preserves remnants of human spontaneity: the privacy of the individual and of the family, the trade union, the political party, the church, the free leisure organization. By atomizing the subject population (and to some extent the rulers as well), National Socialism has not eliminated class relations; on the contrary, it has deepened and solidified the antagonisms.
National Socialism must necessarily carry to an extreme the one process that characterizes the structure of modern society, bureaucratization. In modern anti-bureaucratic literature, this term means little more than the numerical growth of public servants, and especially of civil servants.† Society is pictured as composed of free men and autonomous organizations on the one hand and of a bureaucratic caste, on the other hand, which takes over more and more political power. The picture is inaccurate, for society is not wholly free and unbureaucratic nor is the public bureaucracy the sole bearer of political and social power.
Bureaucratization, correctly understood, is a process operating in both public and private spheres, in the state as well as in society. It means that human relations lose their directness and become mediated relations in which third parties, public or private functionaries seated more or less securely in power, authoritatively prescribe the behavior of man. It is a highly ambivalent process, progressive as well as reactionary. The growth of bureaucracy in public life is not necessarily incompatible with democracy if the aims of the democracy are not limited to the preservation of individual rights, but also include the furtherance of certain social goals. Even in the social sphere the growth of private organizations is not entirely retrogressive. It brings some kind of order into an anarchic society and thereby rationalizes human relations that would otherwise be irrational and accidental.
If members of a trade union decide to change their labor conditions, they do so by accepting the recommendation of their officials, in whose hands the decision is left. When a political party formulates some policy, it is the party hierarchy that does so. In athletic organizations, the machinery of presidents, vice-presidents, secretaries, and treasurers goes into operation in arranging matches and carrying on the other activities of the group. This process of mediation and depersonalization extends to culture as well. Music becomes organized in the hands of professional secretaries who need not be musicians. The radio prescribes the exact amount of culture to be digested by the public, how much classical and how much light music, how much talk and how much news. The powers extend to the most intimate relations of man, to the family. There are organizations for large families and for bachelors, birth-control associations, advisory councils for the promotion of family happiness, consumers’ co-operatives, giant food chain stores making a farce of the consumers’ supposedly free choice.
There is, in short, a huge network of organizations covering almost every aspect of human life, each run by presidents and vice-presidents and secretaries and treasurers, each employing advertising agencies and publicity men, each out to interfere with, and to act as the mediator in, the relations between man and man. Civil liberties lose many of the functions they had in a liberal society. Even the exercise of civil rights tends more and more to be mediated by private organizations. Whether it is a problem of defense in a political trial or protection of the rights of labor or the fight against unjust taxation, the average man, lacking sufficient means, has no other choice but to entrust his rights to some organization. Under democratic conditions, such mediation does not destroy his rights, as a rule, since the individual still has a choice between competing organizations. In a totalitarian society, however, even if his rights are still recognized on paper, they are completely at the mercy of private bureaucrats.
What National Socialism has done is to transform into authoritarian bodies the private organizations that in a democracy still give the individual an opportunity for spontaneous activity. Bureaucratization is the complete depersonalization of human relations. They become abstract and anonymous. On this structure of society, National Socialism imposes two ideologies that are completely antagonistic to it: the ideology of the community and the leadership principle.
The total number of civil servants has increased considerably under the National Socialist regime.4 The officers and professional soldiers of the new standing army are included in the civil service, as well as the enlarged police force (such as the two armed S.S. formations), the labor service leaders, and the officials of the new economic organizations. In addition, what has traditionally been known as the civil service also shows an increase.
The bureaucracy does not form one unified and integrated body. It never has, and the attempts of the National Socialists to break down the stratification have merely scratched the surface. There is a basic distinction between civil servants who exercise political functions and those who do not. Within the political civil service, a further distinction must be drawn between those who frame the political decisions and those who are merely organs of the executive. The former type is best exemplified by the ministerial bureaucracy, the latter by the police and the lower administrative agencies. The non-political civil service includes a large section basically indistinguishable from other workers and salaried employees. Railroad and postal officials, for example, are classed as civil servants in German law, but they neither exercise political power nor perform tasks that could not be done equally well under the labor contract. They serve the public directly in vital economic and social tasks and therefore do not belong to the bureaucracy in the proper sense of the word.
Running through the whole structure of the civil service, there is a social antagonism between the so-called academic (university training and state examination) sections and the non-academic. This distinction is perhaps the most powerful of all in creating a gap between strata within the bureaucracy. The new regime has not touched it, though it is difficult to say whether that means wholehearted acceptance or capitulation. In 1933 the government took the revolutionary step of giving the Prussian ministry of justice to Hanns Kerrl, a middle-ranking, non-academic civil servant in the judicial administration. Kerrl soon had to give up his post and the academic monopoly of the judicial hierarchy has not been disturbed since.
The key positions within the academic civil service are held by the ministerial bureaucracy: assessors, government councillors, ministerial councillors, ministerial directors, secretaries of state. Their power had grown in the last years of Weimar as the decline of parliamentiary democracy brought in the practices of delegated legislation, emergency legislation, and the virtual immunity of the budget and administration from parliamentary control.*
The ministerial bureaucracy is a closed caste. In the Republic its personnel was ostensibly neither anti-democratic nor pro-democratic and cared little about the forms of state and government. The upper civil servant regards the state more or less as a business undertaking to be run efficiently. He has the successful businessman’s cynicism except that administrative efficiency takes the place of profit as his highest goal. Political problems are reduced to technical administrative problems. The inefficiency of parliamentary control and the weakness or inexpertness of the ministerial chiefs strengthened this technocratic and somewhat nihilistic outlook. Essentially, of course, it is an anti-democratic and authoritarian outlook. It values success more than right or social justice. Power is revered because it guarantees efficiency. Efficient and incorruptible in the ordinary sense, the ministerial bureaucracy was the center of every anti-democratic movement in the Weimar Republic.
The number of Socialist officials in the federal administration was small. Only Socialist ministers would make such appointments and they were excessively timid in their personnel policy. They saw no reason to dismiss a ranking functionary unless he consorted with reaction openly. In the present National Socialist ministries, the bureaucracy consists of a startling number of functionaries holding the same, or higher, positions they heid during the Republic. There are variations from ministry to ministry of course (the ministries of propaganda and air are entirely new). Where the change has been least, we can safely assume that the reactionary character of the ministry was greatest in the Republic. The most reactionary of all, the federal ministry of justice, is completely unchanged in personnel despite its consolidation with the Prussian office. Not one of the seven main- or three sub-department heads is new to the service. Only one of the two secretaries of state is new, the National Socialist Dr. Freisler.5 The same holds true for the office of the president of the republic.6 Dr. Meissner served Ebert as faithfully as he served Hindenburg and now Hitler. Only two members of his staff are new. Even in the chancellery, where the situation is different, the head is Hans Heinrich Lammers, an old civil servant, previously with the ministry of the interior (since 1922). Many changes have been made in the foreign office, but they are chiefly transfers from one post to another, characteristic of every foreign office. The one important political change is the appointment of Ernst Wilhelm Bohle to head the department of Germans abroad. Bohle, who was born in Bradford, England, and whose father was a professor at the University of Capetown, is aiso director of the party office for Germans abroad.
The story can be repeated for the ministry of the interior and for the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften (Kaiser Wilhelm Association for the Advancement of Science) attached to it, for the ministry of finance, the federal statistical office, and even for the ministry of labor, which had always had the reputation of being staffed by many staunch democrats.
A complete turnover has taken place at the top in the ministry of economics, which has also undergone a basic structural reorganization. According to the latest report it is now divided into five main departments:7 (1) personnel and administration, headed by Hans Ilgner; (2) industry, under Lieutenant General Hermann von Hanneken; (3) organization of the economy, directed by Schmeer; (4) finance, under Ministerial Director Klucki; and (5) commerce and currency, headed by the under-secretary of state, Gerhard von Jagwitz. The secretary of state for the ministry is Friedrich W. Landfried. The department chiefs are all new men. The rest of the personnel is practically unchanged.
The changes that have been made are not without significance. Most of the secretaries of state are new, like Landfried in the ministry of economics, Freisler in the ministry of justice, Backe in the ministry of food and agriculture, Fritz Reinhardt in the ministry of finance. They are appointees of the National Socialist ministers. In the ministry of labor the outstanding new figure is Dr. Werner Mansfeld, former counsel to the Ruhr employers’ organizations and a member of the Stahlhelm organization, which had been headed and eventually delivered to the National Socialists by Minister of Labor Seldte. Mansfeld is a perfect specimen of the nihilistic postwar generation. As chief of the labor law division he has never betrayed his industrial masters.
In the ministry of economics the next in command to Landfried is Hanneken, the organizer of the iron and steel industry and a typical economic general. Hanneken is a brother-in-law of the German machine dictator, Karl Lange, the manager of the economic group ‘machines.’8 He too has faithfully pursued a policy of full support for the interests of private industry against party interference. The only outsider and the one genuine National Socialist in the ministry is the state councillor, Rudolf Schmeer, who is responsible for the economic organization. After working as an apprentice in the electrical industry, Schmeer became active in the party in 1922. He was convicted by the Belgian army of occupation for sabotage in the Ruhr district in 1923 but never served his sentence. In 1930 he was elected to the Reichstag and subsequently became deputy leader of the labor front. Yet even Schmeer follows the traditional policy of the ministry. In a preface to Barth’s book on economic organization, he indicates his complete agreement with Barth’s insistence that the party has no place in economic life.9*
A detailed comparison of the composition of the bureaucracies in 1931 and in 1936 (in some cases even for 1939) shows that the stability of the academic bureaucracy extends down to the heads of the provincial and local finance organizations, to the members of the federal and provincial financial tribunals, to the civil and criminal courts, and to a large percentage of the domestic administrative staffs (except for Prussia).
The ministerial bureaucracy is a closed caste that does not admit outsiders. Its members are excessively ambitious, and on the whole efficient, technicians who care little for political and social values. Their great desire is to remain where they are, or, more correctly, to be promoted as rapidly as possible. They are neither pro- nor anti-National Socialist, but pro-ministerial-bureaucracy. As in the past, they march with the strongest army—from monarchy through Republic to National Socialism. Nor will they hesitate to abandon the Leader if and when the present regime shows real signs of weakness.
The ministerial bureaucracy has never betrayed industrial capitalism. The few honest trust-busters (like Josten in the ministry of economics) played no role in the Republic and play none now. Faithful service to industrial interests might one day, perhaps after retirement, bring an appointment to a big industrial combine, with higher pay and better social position. Industrial supervisory boards are filled with former secretaries of state and ministerial directors. The bureaucracy is now the most important single agency in the formulation of policy, especially in the economic, financial, social, and agricultural fields. The normal legislator is the ministerial council for the defense of the realm,* and the council relies upon the draft decrees and executive orders prepared by the ministerial bureaucracy. Wider than ever before, the power of this bureaucracy is not unlimited, for it must compete with other bureaucracies of the party, the armed forces, and of industry.
The National Socialist party is before all else a huge bureaucratic machine. Its ruling group consists of Hitler, his deputy (now Bormann), the Reichsleiter at the head of the various departments within the central party administration, the Leader’s heir, Hermann Göring, Hitler’s aide-de-camp, the Gauleiter (district leaders) and those National Socialist cabinet ministers and secretaries of state who do not have specific positions within the party hierarchy.
The Party Hierarchy: THE REICHSLEITER
The influence of the Reichsleiter is decisive. A few are cabinet ministers, others hold high positions in the ministries, still others occupy leading administrative posts. One controls the press, another the youth, a third labor. Some, like Franz Schwarz, are concerned chiefly with inner party administration.* 10
The thirty-three district leaders of the party are beginning to assume more and more importance.11 Many of the new government offices are being filled from their ranks. They are sent to the conquered territories, and serve as governors, federal regents, provincial presidents, and state ministers. Today the most important of the district leaders are Julius Streicher, the most extreme Anti-Semite, Robert Wagner of Baden, Josef Bürckel of the Saar and Lorraine, Fritz Sauckel of Thuringia, Federal Price Commissioner Josef Wagner, Terboven in Norway, H. Lohse, the governor of the Baltic states, Baldur von Schirach, the former youth leader, now federal regent in Vienna. A composite picture of the district leader shows that he was born around 1890, attended elementary school, served as an officer in the First World War, was a school teacher—if he had any fixed profession—and joined the party in its early years. The number of elementary school teachers in the party hierarchy is surprisingly high: Rust, Streicher, the two Wagners, Bürckel, the district leaders of Silesia, and Himmler.12 The leadership of the labor front and of the National Socialist food estate, the provincial peasant leaders, and the fourteen labor trustees bring the total in the party hierarchy to about 120. As a group, they have about the same background and general characteristics as the district leaders. All in all, they are professional politicians, skilled and trained in mass domination.
Though the party administration is centralized in Munich, there is a special center in Berlin under the deputy leader. To the Berlin organization are attached all those party offices that establish direct contact with the ministries and which are often headed by either a ministerial bureaucrat or other ranking civil servant. The foreign policy department is typical. It is headed by E. Bohle, secretary of state in the foreign office. Another is the department of technology under F. Todt, one of the most influential National Socialists. There are departments for racial questions, universities, finance and taxation (headed by Fritz Reinhardt, who is at the same time secretary of state in the ministry of finance), and party literature (under the leadership of the supreme censor, Bouhler).
The dualism of party and government bureaucracy serves a double purpose. The bureaucracy is not disturbed in its smooth functioning and retains full responsibility for administrative and political decisions. At the same time, the influence of the party is secured through the liaison officers.
The party hierarchy can hardly be considered a closed, well-integrated group. There are different wings, whose influence varies on different occasions. The lack of a consistent theory allows the party at any given moment to bring into the foreground ‘radical’ or ‘moderate’ leaders, ‘socialistic’ or ‘capitalistic’ elements, ‘terrorists’ or ‘lovers of humanity.’ The cabals and intrigues inevitably produced in a closed, hierarchic group centering around a leader prevent that homogeneity that is the prerequisite of popular rule.
The civil servants were never enthusiastic supporters of the Weimar democracy. They looked upon the Social Democratic party and trade unions as corrupt and job-hungry ‘criminals’ who had betrayed the monarchy in 1918 for entirely selfish reasons. Though not openly National Socialist, their own union, the DBB, became more and more reactionary as the prestige of the democracy declined.
The present position of the civil service is not at all clear. The National Socialist party apparently controls the elementary teachers’ organization. In 1936 and 1937, 160,000 party political functionaries came from the teaching profession, primarily from the elementary schools (22.9 per cent of a total of 700,000 political leaders).13 Many of these teachers had been trained during the imperial period, and their participation in the National Socialist regime demonstrates the complete deterioration of German philosophical idealism as it was taught officially. More than anything else, the divorce of Kant’s legal and political philosophy, with its insistence on duty, from the rest of his doctrine provided a means of surrounding every perfidy with the halo of idealism. The high-sounding phrases became empty shells to conceal the adoration of power.14 Such a trend is inherent in the very structure of German idealism. By banishing the idea of law into the sphere of transcendence, Kant left ‘actual law and actual morals at the mercy of empiricism and the blind forces of tradition.’15
What is still worse, the majority of the National Socialist teachers received their education under the Weimar Republic. There could be no more terrible indictment of the educational philosophy and policies of German democracy, perhaps of all so-called progressive education. Even during the Republic, sections of the elementary school teachers had stood out as the most inveterate foes of the system, as the most ardent chauvinists, the most passionate anti-Semites. The elementary school teacher belongs to the non-academic civil service and is separated by a deep social gap from the high school teacher with his university education and his academic degree. His income is low and his social status no better than that of any low-ranking non-academic civil servant. Under the empire, however, army service gave him a certain compensatory dignity. As a non-commissioned or reserve officer, he could exercise authority over men who stood higher in the social scale. Weimar removed this compensation. So he turned to the SA, the SS, and the Stahlhelm, while the republican militia (the Reichsbanner) was left largely to the workers. The pseudo-egalitarianism of the National Socialist party and its private army thus provided an excellent outlet for all the resentments accumulated during the life of the pacifist Republic.
The relation between the elementary teachers and the party does not extend to the civil service as a whole. We unfortunately do not possess adequate statistics of the differentiations within the party membership. A report by Hermann Neef, the leader of the civil-service organization, to the convention of 1939 shows that of the one and a half million civil servants, all members of his organization, 28.2 per cent belong to the party;16 8.3 per cent of all civil servants (102,619) were political leaders; 7.2 per cent (98,860) belong to the S.A.; 1.1 per cent (14,122) belong to the S.S.; 1.1 per cent (13,144) belong to the National Socialist motor corps, and 1.6 per cent (19,857) to the National Socialist aviation corps.
The infiltration of the party into the service is accomplished by three devices, by the so-called revolutionary act of 1933 expelling non-Aryan and other unreliable elements, by indoctrination of personnel, and by party monopolization of all new openings in the service. The first of these devices led to the dismissal of 211 and the demotion or transfer of 258 of the higher civil servants in Prussia and of 1.13 per cent and 2.33 per cent respectively of the 2,339 in the remaining states.17 These figures reveal how small the genuinely democratic element was.
Far more important is the indoctrination of the mass of civil servants, which seems to be very successful with the younger generation though apparently much less so with the older group. In a hierarchical structure like the civil service, the superior, if he has unlimited power, will mold the attitudes of his inferiors. The National Socialists have taken over the key positions in the Prussian ministry of the interior, the posts of the provincial and sub-provincial presidents, and of the rural county chiefs (Landrat). Every one of the twelve provincial presidents has been replaced by a party member (usually a district leader), all but one of whom had joined the party before 1933. Of the 34 sub-provincial presidents, 31 are new (19 having joined the party before 1933).18 There are 264 new Prussian county chiefs, 247 of them party members antedating 1933.
Equally important are the figures for the Referendare, those who have passed the first state examination in the law or administration and who, after additional training for three or four years and a second state examination, become assessors and may then practice at the bar or join the civil service or judiciary. Of the 293 new appointees from 1933 to 1936, 99 per cent were party members, 66 per cent having joined between 1922 and 1933.19 The legal basis for appointment is now the Civil Service Act of 26 January 1937, requiring the civil servant to ‘be guided in his whole conduct by the fact that the party, in indissoluble union with the people, is the bearer of the German idea of the state’ and to denounce every person and every action that ‘might endanger the position of the Reich or of the party.’20
We have already seen (see p. 72) that the civil servant may, even without obtaining the consent of his superior, accept unpaid party posts, though in his administrative work he remains subject to the orders of his superior in the bureaucratic hierarchy and to no one else. This principle is stressed in the ruling of 28 December 1939 on administration of county offices,* which limits the role of the party to the leadership of the people, in other words, to problems of popular morale.
National Socialist morale is therefore the primary concern of the party in the civil-service organization. That task had originally been entrusted to the Werkscharen, plant brigades of National Socialism in each public plant, and to the Politische Stosstruppen, political shock troops in the administrative agencies and offices. This dual organization has now been abandoned. By an agreement between Dr. Ley, the leader of the political organization of the party, and Körner, leader of the office of ‘power and transportation’ in the party administration, all National Socialist forces in administrative agencies, offices, and public enterprises are now united.21 They are organized into National Socialist cells, and further subdivided into ‘blocks’ if necessary. Cell and block leaders are appointed by the party leader (Kreisleiter) upon recommendation of the leader of the labor front, the local leader of the civil-service organization, and the local leader of the party. They must be selected either from the plant chairman of the labor front or from the local chairman of the civil-service organization, depending on which group has the majority.
The new organizational set-up is a step in two directions: the destruction of social differentiations and the formation of élites within the civil service. In a law court, for instance, the plant chairman will generally be a lower- or middle-ranking servant, rarely a judge. The National Socialist cell in that court will include the entire personnel, even the charwomen. There could hardly be a more thoroughgoing destruction of social differences in outward appearance. It is a false democratization, however, since differences in status and power remain completely unchanged. An even better example would be a railroad repair shop employing both academic and non-academic civil servants and manual laborers. There will be two plant chairmen, one for the workers appointed by the local labor front, another for the civil servants designated by their local organization. According to the Ley-Körner agreement, ail the employees form one cell and the leadership falls to the workers’ chairman if the workers have the majority, which is likely to be the case. False democratization is thus not limited to the civil service but also extends to distinctions between manual worker and civil servant, again without changing the real financial, social, and political differences in the slightest degree. Over both groups, furthermore, there towers a reliable élite, acting as a terrorizing agency against anyone who slackens in his manifestations of faith in the party or who is unwilling to contribute to the winter help and similar undertakings.
The relation between the party and the civil service is thus not at all simple. The ministerial bureaucracies are relatively free from old party members. Their relation with the party is established either through liaison officers, or, as in the case of the police, youth, and propaganda agencies, by assigning state tasks directly to the party. In the middle and lower hierarchies, on the other hand, the key positions are in the hands of the party, while the non-party majority of the civil servants is terrorized and indoctrinated through the cells. The party has an unquestionable control over promotions and fills new positions from the ranks of its reliable members. The submergence of civil service in the party is in full swing.
The German army leadership, like the ministerial bureaucracy, is probably not National Socialist, strictly speaking. No one really knows anything about the exact relation between the party and the armed forces. One guess is as good as another. An understanding of certain trends, however, may help us form an intelligent opinion.
It is not true that the army rules Germany. It has never done so and does not now. In fact, it does so less today than in any previous war. At the same time, the army is the sole body in present-day Germany that has known how to keep itself organizationally free from party interference. Through its economic generals, in fact, the army has encroached upon the party and the civil bureaucracies. The army bureaucracy is the most fervent advocate of ‘free capitalism’ against all attempts of the National Socialist party leaders to extend the power of the state. The German army (unlike the navy, perhaps) under the Kaiser was not the driving force in imperialism. Under the Kaiser, for example, it fought an army expansion program that threatened to entail democratization of the army.* The Weimar army was chiefly interested in playing the leading role in the state and in avenging the defeat of 1918. It is safe to assume that the present leadership fully agrees with National Socialism in so far as the restoration of Germany to its 1914 frontiers and reacquisition of the colonies are concerned. Its close contacts with industrial capital have tended to make of the present German army the most powerful arm of imperialist expansion.
The connections have always been extremely close between army, industrial, and agrarian leadership, so close as to give the appearance of an extensive caste. Industry found it useful to add admirals and generals (like former high civil servants) to its supervisory boards. Under National Socialism the short-term interests are identical: industry made profits, the bankrupt agrarian holdings were saved, the officer corps gained social standing and political power, and the sons of the agrarians and industrialists once again found occupations fitting their social status.
Earlier attacks on the Prussian officer corps had always been directed against the preponderance of the nobility, especially of the landed section. We now know that this criticism was not entirely correct. Though the landed aristocracy was probably the most unenlightened and most reactionary group in Prussian society, it was not, and is not now, the most aggressive. It retained some of the more decent characteristics of feudalism, the longing for culture, even though dilettante, for comradeship and faith. These attributes have disappeared, to be replaced by a pseudo-egalitarianism veiling a complete contempt for the masses and a brutal aggressiveness especially among the younger officers. Such experiences as the purge of 30 June 1934 should have destroyed the illusions common in the outside world about the honesty, comradeship, ‘Prussian tradition,’ and other laudable qualities of the German officer corps. The army officer of today is a technician, interested in keeping the army machine running. The reaction of the Reichswehr to the murder of their comrades Schleicher and Bredow shows how profound a change has taken place. If a republican ministry had merely insulted a general, the whole officers corps would have risen in wrath. Yet the cold-blooded murder of two generals who had done more than anyone else to promote military interests during Weimar found the whole army kowtowing before the supreme judge, Adolf Hitler.
The army could not do anything else. The blood purge was directed primarily against the S.A. leader Röhm, who had advocated a second revolution and sought to introduce the whole body of his S.A. into the army, with himself as minister of war. Against these ambitions, Hitler organized the purge, most likely with the knowledge, and perhaps even with the support, of the army generals. ‘Germanic faith’ ended where selfish interests began. On 4 January 1938, the army leadership suffered a second major defeat when Blomberg’s marriage to a social inferior led to the replacement of Fritsch and many other ranking officers by the more servile leadership of Keitel and Brauchitsch. The army also betrayed the church and the religiosity once the cornerstone upon which its spiritual power rested. The National Socialist army oath has no religious character: the Leader has been substituted for God.
The S.A. monopolizes post-military training (decree of 19 January 1939). The S.A. keeps the males bodily fit in the so-called Wehrmannschaften, while the army is restricted to military training proper. Pseudo-egalitarianism has also been introduced in the retired officers’ organization, the National League for German Officers. In 1939 its name was changed to Officers’ Welfare Community, and it was placed under the control of the National Warriors’ League (Reichskriegerbund). The membership of the latter group is drawn largely from privates and non-commissioned officers.
There are limits, of course, beyond which the army cannot allow party interference. A certain rationality operates within the army making it impossible to deliver the army lock, stock, and barrel to the party leadership. The legally recognized incompatibility between army membership and party activity,* previously discussed in another connection, has survived frequent challenge by the younger officers. Himmler’s attempts to gain jurisdiction over the army have failed completely. On the other hand, the S.S. operates alongside of, and often in conflict with, the military authorities in the conquered territories, even where the political pattern is one of military rule.* Army objections to terroristic methods against the civil population may very well be the reason why civil rule has been preferred in most of the conquered lands.
In general, it is difficult to speculate about the attitude of the armed forces. The leadership has been submitting to political control by the party and has permitted the destruction of its most sacred traditions. One immediate aim dominates the party, the army, and industry: Now that the war has come, a German defeat must be prevented at all costs. Beyond that, however, it is doubtful whether any real identity of aims can be assumed. The army is out to preserve its existence, its social and political status, and it will not willingly surrender this position whatever course the war may take.
Contrary to the common belief in this country, industrial leadership in National Socialist Germany is by no means the monopoly of ‘managers.’ Throughout the industrial set-up, and particularly in certain vital divisions like the machine industry, control remains overwhelmingly in the hands of the private entrepreneur or family, and the managers are no more than salaried employees taking orders from the owners.
The continued existence of an influential group of private capitalists does not conflict with the trend toward bureaucratization of the economy. The two problems should not be confused. An economic system may be bureaucratic; it may be integrated into a network of organizations, of cartels, groups, and chambers controlled by permanent officials; these organizations may vie with each other for control; the modern corporation may be defined as an hierarchical structure in itself—and private capitalism still remains. Not only are private capitalism and bureaucratization of the economy not incompatible, they actually complement each other at a certain stage in the development of monopoly capitalism.
Bureaucratization of private life, as previously defined, means the interference of professional organizations in direct human relations. In the economic sphere it means that a stratum of officials stands between the owner and the surrounding world of the state, consumer, worker, and competitor, exercising the function of the owner under the latter’s control. Though it thus destroys the direct relations between property and the surrounding world, bureaucratization still does not destroy the institution of private property. Nothing could be more erroneous than to call National Socialism a feudal system,22 for the essence of feudalism, sociologically speaking, is the directness of human relations expressed without mediation by a market. Bureaucratization of the economy entails the complete depersonalization of all property relations. Even the traditional market economy leaves a large number of direct human relations in existence. It is the essence of National Socialism to have destroyed those that remained.
Some measure of bureaucratization of the economy is inevitable in our society. The joint stock corporation, the cartel, the combine are all bureaucratic forms. As monopolization increases and as business seeks more and more control over the state, it must develop more highly organized forms of political pressure. In turn, the more the state interferes in the economic life, the faster will the pressure groups grow. All this means greater regimentation and the individual would be completely helpless without organizations to interpose between himself, the state, the competitor, the consumer, or the worker. The utmost of formal rationality is reached. Human relations are now fully abstract and anonymous. This depersonalization also serves to conceal the seat of economic power, the real economic rulers operating behind the plethora of organizations surrounding private property. It is responsible for the false interpretation of bureaucratization of the economy as the disappearance of private ownership.
There is also a second reason why the two processes are not incompatible. The manager may turn into a capitalist. Actually the term ‘manager’ is a loose one, meaning one of three things. He may be a highly paid employee and nothing else, directing the enterprise according to specific instructions. A second type is the manager who has risen from the ranks of the leading salaried employees or who was once a capitalist and has by one device or another captured control of an enterprise. We might call such a man a capitalist-manager. He soon is accepted by the capitalists proper, becomes virtually indistinguishable from them, and shares in the industrial leadership.
Even within the group of pure managers, finally, a clear distinction must be made between the entrepreneurial (or corporation) and the organizational type. The former directs an individual enterprise or combine and occupies a higher position than the manager of a professional business organization like the cartel, the association, or the chamber. The trade association official or the cartel secretary has one ambition—to transfer to an industrial enterprise, with a higher salary and an improved social status. With that objective constantly before him, he is a willing tool of the most powerful and the most wealthy members of the organization.
Here is one of the basic distinctions between the trade-union secretary and the organizational manager. The former is either an equal among equals or has a higher social status than the rank and file. He may flatter the members to strengthen his power, but frequently trade-union officials carry out their own policies as they see them with little concern for the desires and wishes of the membership. The organizational manager, on the contrary, is faced with huge differences in power and wealth among the members of his organization. He is a nonentity; his sole aim is to please the most powerful. His power is, therefore, far less than that of the trade-union functionary and he is much less independent. He is often far more capitalistically minded and far more employer-conscious than the capitalists themselves. What Max Weber called the ‘advantage of small numbers’ operates as a qualifying factor: The more numerous the membership, the more independent the leaders and professional organizers. That is why the executives of the retail trade associations, for example, are comparatively powerful, those in the mining and heavy industry fields decidedly unimportant.
These distinctions between capitalist, capitalist-manager, corporation manager, and organization manager must be kept in mind in analyzing the composition of the industrial leadership.23 The composition of the leadership can best be studied in the groups and chambers. The organs of self-government are the mediating agencies between the state and business. They collaborate in the framing, or at least in the executing, of all economic decisions. They represent the attempt to incorporate all business into one single block, capable of carrying out any decision efficiently. They translate the economic power of big business into political power. The autonomous organizations of German business are thus run by a combination of capitalists, capitalist-managers, and corporation managers, supported by a body of experts, chiefly lawyers and economists, who had filled similar positions under the Republic.
The National Economic Chamber is headed by Albert Pietzsch, who is also president of the Munich Chamber of Industry and Commerce and of the Economic Chamber of Bavaria. Born in 1874, Pietzsch studied engineering at the technical college in Dresden, received his practical training in a chemical factory, invented various new processes, and in 1910 founded the Electro-Chemical Works in Munich, which he still controls and operates. He joined the party in 1925 out of resentment at his exclusion from Munich high society. From 1933 to 1936 he was the economic expert on the staff of the Leader’s deputy. His executive secretary in the national organization, significantly enough, is a typical organizational manager, Dr. Gerhard Erdmann. A lawyer by profession and a party member, Erdmann served as an officer during the First World War and headed an important department in the Federation of German Employers’ Organizations until its dissolution in 1933.
The following table presents the composition of the leadership of all national groups, of the six transportation groups, of all economic groups, and of the branch groups in the national group industry.
Representatives of public corporations |
13 |
Capitalists (mostly leaders) |
20 |
Capitalist-managers (mostly leaders) |
17 |
Corporation managers (mostly leaders) |
31 |
Organizational managers and secretaries |
27 |
Civil servants |
9 |
No biographical data available |
56 |
Total |
173 |
Former army officers |
31 |
Party membership declared |
21 |
Every important industrial combine is represented in the leadership of the groups. The most powerful figure is undoubtedly Wilhelm Zangen, the general manager of the Mannesmann combine and head of the national group industry, whose name is found on many important supervisory boards of industrial corporations, banks, insurance companies, and public or semi-public corporations. Next is the leader of the national group banking, Otto Christian Fischer, formerly associated with the Reichskreditgesellschaft and now a partner in a Munich private bank. Other combines represented in the leadership of the groups are the United Steel Trust, the Salzdeth-furth potash combine, General Electric, the oil combine, the Göring combine, the Gutehoffnungshütte, Zeiss, the Portland Cement combine, the cellulose combine. A considerable number of the leaders come from middle-sized businesses, of course, since many of the groups are made up of smaller industries like machine, building, textile, leather, trade, handicraft.
The picture is different in the provincial economic chambers. Instead of analyzing the 100 chambers of industry and commerce and the 70 chambers of handicraft, it is better to study the leadership composition in the economic chambers because their functions are much more comprehensive. For example, it is they who distribute public orders among the businessmen in their territories.
The Leadership in 17 Provincial Economic Chambers
I. Leaders |
|
Capitalists |
10 |
Capitalist-managers |
3 |
Corporation managers |
3 |
No biographical data available |
1 |
|
17 |
Party officials |
2 |
Army officers |
13 |
Party membership declared |
14 |
Representatives of industrial combines |
5 |
Owners of independent enterprises |
7 |
Bankers |
2 |
II. Managers |
|
Civil servants |
1 |
Organizational managers |
11 |
Party officials |
1 |
No biographical data available |
4 |
|
17 |
Officers |
8* |
Party membership declared |
7* |
The leadership in the provincial chambers thus lies chiefly with independent businessmen of substantial means who joined the party before 1933 and who were reserve officers in 1914-18. Their appointment is their reward for faithful party service. Every president of a provincial chamber is at the same time the president of his local chamber of industry and commerce. Only five leaders represent combines: two are party officials and two bankers (Friedrich Reinhart* and Kurt von Schröder.)† Most of the managers were also reserve officers and party members before 1933. Their previous experience was with chambers of commerce, cartels, or the old Spitzenverbände. Some are also party officials.
Leaders and Managers of the Economic Chambers
The industrial leadership today differs in three respects from that under the Weimar Republic. Commercial capital is no longer represented. The free trader is a phenomenon of the past. Trade has become a function of the monopolistic producers who have either set up their own distributing apparatus or have transformed the wholesaler and retailer into their administrative agents. Secondly, banking capital has lost its position as already indicated. And among the monopolistic producers, the formerly exclusive domination of heavy industry has been somewhat restricted. The chemical and certain metallurgical industries have come to the fore and have changed their character; they too have become heavy industries. The Dye Stuff Trust of today is as much a mining as a chemical combine. The vertical combine from coal (or lignite) to manufacturing is the type which best expresses the industrial leadership. This leadership is thus smaller in number, more closely integrated, and much more powerful than heretofore. By the device of self-government in industry, the whole economy has been incorporated into the rule of monopolistic producers not only factually but also legally.
The most formidable allies of heavy industry in the struggle against democracy were owners of the large estates, and especially those in the rye belt of eastern and northern Germany. The inflation of 1921-3 had freed agriculture from its indebtedness, but only for a fleeting moment. After the unusually bad harvests of 1924 and 1925 the peasants were in debt again. In the late fall of 1925 they were selling their crops at any price to raise cash. Prices fell below the level of the world market, with long-term credits absolutely unavailable. Subsidies began to flow and the credit system was reorganized to try to stem the tide. Unfortunately, there was no planning in the government program. High tariffs and the system of subsidies prevented rationalization of the dairy and vegetable industries, in contrast to Holland and Denmark, for example. One illustration will suffice. By stimulating the production of fodder, the German government could have given major assistance to the dairy farmer. Instead, it retained the grain tariffs and thus protected the most costly and most capitalistic of all branches of agricultural production.
The Weimar policy of internal colonization also left large landowners untouched. A statute of u August 1919 gave the government the right to expropriate estates at rates below market value, but the federal supreme court declared it unconstitutional. The resettlement administration then resorted to direct purchase. What little they could accomplish for the peasants (19,000 families resettled from 1919 to 1925) was fully balanced by a proportionate expansion on the part of the big estates. With their higher rate of profit and their protected position, the latter could easily and steadily acquire smaller farms. All the agrarian loan institutions, furthermore, favored the larger estates with lower interest rates (much as the banks made special concessions to the larger industrial concerns).
The depression of 1929 undoubtedly hit agriculture more severely than industry. Farm prices declined while industrial prices remained rather stationary, thus widening the scissors. Peasants revolted and the Junkers started their final offensive against the democracy. Hindenburg had close connections with the East Elbian Junkers and not one of the last three pre-Hitler cabinets, Brüning, Papen, or Schleicher, dared to take advantage of the agricultural depression to divide the latifundia among the small farmers. On the contrary, financial assistance from the federal and local governments was used chiefly to maintain the privileges of the large estates. The Eastern Help Act of 31 March 1931, for example, enacted by the Brüning cabinet ostensibly to relieve the suffering population of the eastern provinces, actually became a device to preserve the social and economic status of the Junkers. When Schleicher ordered an investigation into the subsidy system in order to win political support from the trade unions, he was denounced to the President as an agrarian Bolshevik by the Junker camarilla and was forced to resign. The immediate antecedent to Hitler’s appointment was thus the revival of the political influence of the Junkers.
The National Socialist food estate has successfully organized food production and distribution on a vertical basis, neglecting no sphere of agriculture. Farm prices are fixed by the government. The peasant has been subsidized and anchored in ‘blood and soil.’ That is National Socialism’s proudest boast. The peasant is to constitute the ‘new nobility of blood and soil’ and the ‘path breaker of an organic exchange of commodities.’24
By the Hereditary Estate Act, in force since 1 October 1933, the peasant (only if racially a pure Aryan, of course) was tied to the land. Upon his death, it passes to one heir, undivided and unencumbered. The order of succession is fixed: the son, his offspring, the father, brothers or daughters and their offspring, sisters. To be a hereditary peasant one must be bauernfähig, that is, capable of managing the farm. The size of the estate must not exceed 125 hectares (about 300 acres) as a rule, although it is permissible for one peasant to own several farms exceeding this limit in total acreage. The minimum size varies according to the fertility of the soil, following the principle that the farm must be sufficient to support a family. The total number of hereditary estates in 1938 was 684,997, occupying 15,562,000,000 hectares of land, or 37 per cent of the whole agricultural and forest area under cultivation.25
A few figures will quickly dispel any notion that National Socialism has revised or even checked the process of agricultural centralization or realized the romantic ideal of a middle peasant rooted in his soil. As with industry, German agriculture has moved steadily toward bigger and bigger estates.26 National Socialism can hardly be expected to sacrifice efficiency to an anachronism. Only the ideology remains romantic, opposed to the reality, as usual.
The structure of ownership has undergone a considerable change. The average size of the hereditary estates protected by the 1933 statute has increased from 12.3 hectares in 1933 to 22.5 in 1939.27 Small peasants have been dispossessed, victims of the process of centralization. And even among hereditary peasants a process of concentration has been taking place.
Internal colonization has become too insignificant to mention. The number of new farms for peasants fell steadily from 4,931 in 1934 to 798 in 1939.28 Nor does the earlier figure mean that the anachronistic doctrine actually prevailed among the National Socialist leaders for a time. The total land acquired or placed at the disposal of the 4,931 new settlers was 148,000 hectares, of which 6,000 were moor land, 23,000 were carved out of state property, 109,000 acquired from private estates of more than 100 hectares, and 15,000 from the smaller private farms.29 In 1934 the total acreage of farms of 100 hectares or more was approximately 20,000,000 hectares, so that the re-settlement figures even at the peak were depressingly insignificant. Net income increases in proportion to the size of the farm. Max Sering, the leading agricultural economist of Germany, has published figures showing that although big farms suffered losses in 1924, their net return in 1935 was 53 marks per cultivated hectare as against 49 marks for the middle-sized and only 28 marks for the small farm.30
The independent small farmer has not disappeared, however. He still makes up 40 per cent of the total of independents.31 But within the peasantry the economic process of centralization is being paralleled by a social process of élite formation. National Socialism is deliberately creating a reliable élite of wealthy peasants at the expense of the small farmer. The 700,000 hereditary peasants form a privileged body: Their estates cannot be encumbered; they may extend their holdings; their prices are protected.
The peasant élite is being created without de-feudalizing or even dividing the entailed Junker estates. National Socialism has retained the inheritance system (the so-called Fideikommisse) abolished in France by the Revolution of 1789 and in the western parts of Germany after the Napoleonic conquest. The entailed estate belongs to the family as a super-owner while the head of the family owns and manages it, though he can neither encumber nor alienate it. The Weimar constitution had called for the dissolution of entailed estates and the Prussian government set up a special board in 1919 to carry out this provision. Nothing much happened, however. There is an obvious, though superficial, similarity between the entailed Junker estates and the hereditary peasant estates. The National Socialists have seized upon the law of entail in order to give the Junkers, the feudal lords, the protection of the Hereditary Estates Act, ostensibly passed to protect the peasant.32 That is how they repaid the Junker class for its considerable assistance in bringing the new regime into power.
The political influence of the Junkers is still strong, though not decisive. They are powerful in the food estate, in the agricultural credit and finance corporations, in the army, in the ministerial bureaucracy, and even in the entourage of the Leader. Two anachronisms are preserved thereby: the Junker class and the hereditary peasantry. The one forms the remnants of a dying ruling class, the other the élite among the independent peasantry.
The ruling class of National Socialist Germany is far from homogeneous. There are as many interests as there are groups. Nothing holds them together but the reign of terror and their fear lest the collapse of the regime destroy them all. Attempts have been made to merge the four hierarchical groups into one integrated élite, as in the supervisory board of the Continental Oil Corporation,* which under certain conditions might become the model of a new ruling class composed of the party, the army, the bureaucracy, and industry. But, as this corporation itself shows, the unity of the ruling groups rests on the oppression and exploitation of foreign countries and of the German people alike. Germany must conquer so that the four groups may reap the benefits. That is the essence of the highly praised Continental Oil Corporation, the one tie that binds the ruling class together.
What if attempts at conquest fail? Will the identity of short-term interests be able to withstand the pressure of ruthless egoism on the one hand and of the popular hatred of National Socialism on the other? Probably not. Industry wanted to get rid of unrestricted competition and of the trade unions—but it was far from desiring a system of party control such as has developed. Retailers and handicraftsmen wanted to crush the power of the banks and of Jewish competitors—but they have no desire to be purged. The bureaucracy was grateful for the abolition of parliamentary control and for the elimination of Social Democratic trade-union officials—but they do not like the overlordship of zealous party hierarchs. The officers wanted a huge army expansion program—but they detest party meddling.
These various strata are not held together by a common loyalty. To whom could they give it, after all? Not to the state, for it has been abolished ideologically and even to a certain extent in reality. The ideological basis on which the army and bureaucracy formerly rested has been destroyed. Adoration of the Leader is no adequate substitute, because the Leader’s charisma will be completely deflated if he does not prove his worth, that is, if he is not successful. Furthermore, leadership adoration is so deeply contradictory to the process of bureaucratization and depersonalization that a mere postulation of a community integrated by a Leader is insufficient. Racial proletarianism is similarly dependent on final victory. As for such concepts as freedom and equality, it is doubtful if they were ever the basis for common loyalty, certainly not now. The monarchical tradition is gone; even the leader of the reactionary Kapp Putsch in 1920 carefully separated himself from monarchist aims. Religion is but a minor concern of the party and there is a serious split in the ranks of the clergy.
Nothing remains but profits, power, prestige, and above all, fear. Devoid of any common loyalty and concerned solely with the preservation of their own interests, the ruling groups will break apart as soon as the miracle-producing Leader meets a worthy opponent. At present, each section needs the others. The army needs the party because the war is totalitarian. The army cannot organize society ‘totally’; that is left to the party. The party, on the other hand, needs the army to win the war and thus to stabilize and even aggrandize its own power. Both need monopolistic industry to guarantee continuous expansion. And all three need the bureaucracy to achieve the technical rationality without which the system could not operate. Each group is sovereign and authoritarian; each is equipped with legislative, administrative, and judicial power of its own; each is thus capable of carrying out swiftly and ruthlessly the necessary compromises among the four.
The process of renewing the ruling class is becoming more and more of a party monopoly, organizationally at least. Though economic leadership is still largely inherited—and that is true of managerial positions in corporations as well as of ownership—the renewal of the political leadership is in party hands both in law and in fact. Every youth, for example, is a member of the Hitler Youth, controlled by party hierarchs who make use of the state machinery to carry out party aims. The family and the church still remain as counteracting agencies, however, living in the traditions of the past. And the antagonisms that National Socialism produces (to be discussed later) must also be considered as a competing factor.
Elementary schools, high schools, and universities are subject to increasing control.33 For its own functionaries, the party has established Adolf Hitler schools (one for each district), schools for the labor services, for the S.A. and S.S. Then there are the so-called ‘order castles’ (Ordensburgen), established and run according to the principles laid down by the ideological oracle, Alfred Rosenberg:
The National Socialist movement has decided to select and unify from the mass of 70 million a nucleus of men to whom the special task of state leadership will be entrusted, whose members grow from youth on into the idea of an organic politics . . . The National Socialist state is, therefore, if we wish to use old concepts to describe its structure, a monarchy on a republican basis.
All this is to be achieved by the creation of a National Socialist Order, says Rosenberg.34 Such an order has not been created yet, however, and we do not know whether it ever will be, but the groundwork is being laid in the order castles where the élite of the party spends four years in training.
Nor is that all. There is a party university that concentrates on Anti-Semitism. There are schools for plant leaders (four-week courses),35 and so on. It is in these undertakings that the middle classes and even sections of the working class find their compensation for the loss of economic prospects. The craftsman and the shopkeeper, the dispossessed peasant, the worker who can no longer rise within the circle of his own party and trade union, they may all be selected to rise in the new party hierarchy—if they are pure Aryans, physically outstanding, and politically docile.
A comparison of the social composition of the universities with that of the party is significant. During the Republic, 34.1 per cent of the university students came from the upper classes, 59.2 per cent from the middle, and only 5.9 from the lower classes, the workers furnishing only 3.2 per cent of all university students.36 No analysis of the social composition under National Socialism is available,37 but there is no reason to assume that it has changed. The university is no longer the crux of the educational system after all. Total enrolments have dropped sharply, as the result of a deliberate policy, from 97,576 in 1932 to 51,527 in 1938 (for women from 18,578 to 6,346 during the same period).38 More than 90 per cent of the students are organized in the National Socialist students’ association (Deutsche Studentenschaft).
According to official statistics, about one-third of the party members come from the working classes, about 20.6 per cent are salaried employees, and the rest are distributed among independents, peasants, officials, and others.39 The proportion of civil servants rose from 6.7 per cent in 1933 to 13.0 per cent in 1935; the bureaucracy marches with the victors.*
* See also pp. 195-6.
† See also pp. 77-9.
* See p. 24.
* See p. 355.
* See p. 56.
* See above p. 81.
* On the constitutional relation between party and civil service, see above, p. 65.
* See p. 72.
* See p. 6.
* See p. 71.
* See p. 173.
* There may be other officers and party members but that cannot be determined from the available biographies.
* See p. 326.
† See p. 326.
* See pp. 276, 356.
* Professor Theodore Abel40 has, on the basis of life histories of National Socialists, which he collected in Germany in 1933, found that his panel was composed of 35 per cent workers, 51 per cent members of the lower middle classes, 7 per cent of the higher middle classes and the aristocracy, and 7 per cent peasants. Though these figures are in no way representative for the party as a whole, they nevertheless indicate the large share of the lower classes, so that the rise in the social scale will benefit considerably these groups in society.
