23

Hitler’s Regime

In assuming the office of Reich President in August 1934, Hitler, whose official title from now on was ‘Führer and Reich Chancellor’, had finally established himself as sole dictator. Moreover, the Nazis believed their regime had a clear constitutional basis. For in their view Hitler’s position did not depend on his having been appointed by the President in 1933 and then becoming President himself after a plebiscite, but on the principle that, because of his historic mission, only he was capable of enacting the ‘will of the nation’ in a ‘pure and unadulterated’ manner. This was the view of Ernst Rudolf Huber, one of the leading constitutional lawyers in the Third Reich.¹ According to Huber, this regime was based not on popular sovereignty but on the sovereignty of the ‘Führer’: ‘The Führer unites in himself all sovereign power in the Reich; all public power exercised within the state and in the movement is derived from the Führer’s power. . . . For political power is not invested in the state as an impersonal entity, but rather it is invested in the Führer as the one who implements the common will of the Volk [ethnic nation]. The Führer’s power is comprehensive and total; it unites in itself all the agencies that shape the political sphere; it extends to all areas of the ethnic nation’s life; it encompasses all national comrades, who in turn have a duty of loyalty and obedience to the Führer.’² Thus the personal will of the ‘Führer’ had taken the place of the government. His word could have the force of law. As Huber put it, ‘In truth there is only one lawgiver in the German Reich and that is the Führer himself . . .’³

Hitler had paved the way for this development from an early stage. Even in 1933 the government’s importance had diminished relatively quickly. After the cabinet had ceased to be a coalition in mid-1933 the Chancellor called meetings less and less frequently. The last routine cabinet meeting was on 9 December 1937, although on 5 February 1938 ministers assembled once again to hear a statement from Hitler on the Blomberg–Fritsch crisis.⁴ After that Lammers, the head of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, made repeated attempts to set a date for a meeting, but Hitler always found new reasons to put it off.⁵ In effect he simply let cabinet meetings peter out; no official decision to abandon them was ever announced.

Instead, Hitler increasingly used Lammers to clarify draft legislation directly with the ministries concerned. Formal approval was then given through the ‘circulation procedure’^*.⁶ Thus the Reich government was soon no longer working as a single committee but fragmented into a ‘polycratic’ collection of specialist departments, all of which were individually subordinate to the head of government.⁷ The marginalization of the cabinet as a collective body meant that the work of producing legislation increasingly lost its unity; government legislation was gradually replaced by decrees issued by individual ministries, and by Hitler himself, for he had ‘Führer decrees’ or ‘Führer edicts’ published in the Reichsgesetzblatt and these were regarded as having the force of law. As far as Lammers could manage it, they too had been agreed beforehand with the responsible departments, but if he had not managed it, repeated mistakes and awkward situations ensued.⁸

This increasing lack of clarity prompted the Interior Minister to try in 1937 to secure a ranking order among the ministries with regard to their responsibility for legislation. The project, tellingly, came to nothing because of opposition from Hitler, who decided instead to extend the Enabling Act [which was limited to four years] as a less complicated solution.⁹ However, he appears to have recognized that this act was not a substitute for establishing his dictatorship permanently on a constitutional basis, for, on a number of occasions, he referred to plans to create a senate that would determine the succession and establish the outlines of a future constitution. As early as 1930 a ‘senate chamber’ had been set up in the Brown House, but in the end no such institution to lead the Party was created, any more than a senate was established to be the highest constitutional body in the Third Reich.¹⁰ Hitler had in any case already settled his succession late in 1934, although this had not been made public. In December 1934 he had nominated deputies to stand in for him in the event of his being unable to carry out his responsibilities as Chancellor and President: Blomberg would be responsible for army and defence matters, Hess for Party matters, and Göring for ‘all other government matters’. Also in December 1934 he had issued a decree naming Göring as his successor if he should die. Both sets of provisions were top secret. In addition, to make the process even more secure, he subsequently enacted a law that was never made public, giving him the power to determine his own successor.¹¹

The ‘Führer’ between state and Party

As in the years before 1933, Hitler continued to lead the Party in a way that allowed him to pursue his policy of avoiding as far as possible any rigid structures that might limit his own position in it or restrict it through institutions. In particular, he prevented the formation of any collective leadership body or the creation of a central office with comprehensive powers to direct the Party.

With the aid of a rapidly expanding bureaucracy (the staff of the ‘Führer’s’ Deputy led by the dynamic Martin Bormann) Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy for Party matters, did in fact succeed in 1934/35 in assuming a central role within the complex of offices within the NSDAP headquarters. Yet Hess had no general authority to give instructions either to the Gauleiters or to the Reichsleiters whom Hitler had appointed in June 1933.¹² Hess derived his powers with regard to the Gauleiters and Reichsleiters only from the ‘authority’ assigned to him in 1933 as Hitler’s deputy. As this authority was not specified (and Hitler was careful not to be more precise) Hess and Bormann worked on the basic assumption that their offices, in line with Hitler’s omnipotence, had ‘unlimited’ scope. On the other hand, Robert Ley, the head of the Reich Party organization and Hess’s most important adversary within the Party leadership, was constantly trying to define areas of responsibility within the leadership and thus restrict Hess’s freedom of action. The Reichsleiters and also the numerous heads of the central main offices of the NSDAP who did not hold the rank of Reichsleiter were in any case dependent on Ley’s agreement when making decisions on organizational, personnel, and financial matters, although in other respects they were answerable only to Hitler.¹³

The position of the Party Treasurer, Franz Xaver Schwarz, who was head of the biggest office within the Party headquarters, also remained out of reach of the ‘Führer’s’ Deputy. On 16 September 1931 Hitler had assigned him sole authority to act for the Party in legal affairs involving property, and this was expressly confirmed by Hess on 2 July 1933.¹⁴

Hess and Bormann managed, however, to take control of the personnel matters of those Party functionaries whose appointment or dismissal Hitler had reserved for himself. This involved all office holders from district leader upwards and also the political leaders in the Reich Party headquarters. As a result, they both acquired considerable influence over Hitler’s personnel policy. In addition, by greatly increasing the number of regulations and reports, Hess’s office attempted to make the Party apparatus the vehicle by which it carried out its own policies,¹⁵ while also asserting its claim to be the sole representative of the Party in its relations with the state. In concrete terms this meant that during 1934/35 Hess successfully insisted on being involved in the legislative process and in the appointment of senior Reich and state [Land] civil servants. Whenever political issues of ‘fundamental’ importance arose with regard to the state, his office insisted on its right to intervene.¹⁶

As a result of the limit imposed in 1933, the number of NSDAP members was stable at around 2.5 million. (It was not until 1937 that this restriction was gradually lifted; by the outbreak of war the Party had a total of 5.3 million members and finally, by the beginning of 1945, eight to nine million.)¹⁷ There was a remarkable concentration of functionaries in the Party. On 1 January 1935 there were more than 500,000 members of the political cadre (two-thirds of whom had only joined after the seizure of power) out of about 2.5 million members in all. In other words, one member in five held some kind of post in the Party.¹⁸ This ratio remained for the most part constant. At the beginning of 1940 there were more than 1.2 million members of the political cadre in the NSDAP.¹⁹ More than 90 per cent of Party functionaries held their office as unsalaried volunteers. On top of that the various sections and organizations linked to the Party, such as the NS Welfare Organization and the German Labour Front, made use of many additional helpers (so-called wardens), whose numbers had already grown to more than 1.3 million by the start of 1935 and went on rising.²⁰

The greatest concentration of functionaries in the Party organization was at local level, where over 90 per cent of them were active.²¹ In 1936 the organization of the Party’s work at local level was revised. Unlike in the period before 1933, the ‘period of struggle’, the Party structure was no longer to be geared to the number of members, but rather it was to establish a network covering the whole of Germany that would be as dense and as evenly spread as possible, so that the whole population would be accounted for, supervised, and controlled.²² ‘Education’ and ‘surveillance’ were the tasks Hitler had sent the political cadre home with from the Party Rally of 1935.²³

To this end the following benchmarks informed the reform of the Party structure in 1936. The ‘block’, the smallest unit of the Party organization, was to be responsible for forty to sixty households. To maximize the level of surveillance, the block leader (often called the block warden) could be given additional helpers. ‘Cells’ consisted of between four and eight blocks and were overseen by local branches, which were not to cover more than 3,000 households. The leader of the local branch had a staff with a variety of responsibilities (secretary, treasurer, head of organizational matters, head of personnel, head of training, head of propaganda, press liaison officer). All these jobs were done on a voluntary basis.²⁴ As a visible sign of their power, the leaders of local branches were also allowed to carry a handgun.²⁵ In 1938 there was a further reform, the main purpose of which was to increase the number of local groups to make the network even more dense.²⁶

For the population this meant that they were systematically ‘processed’ by countless Party workers. Thus the boundaries between education, supervision, surveillance, and intimidation were fluid. Local groups were instructed to concern themselves with people’s everyday worries by giving individual counsel and so, for example, they helped people in dealing with various government agencies or with rental disputes. They also pressed those for whom they were responsible for donations, or urged them to put up flags, or pictures of Hitler in their homes, to use the officially recognized greetings, to attend meetings, or to cast their vote in elections. They also put pressure on them to be actively involved in National Socialism. A dissenting or even just a reserved attitude towards the Party’s representatives or comments on political events and the like were not only carefully documented in the local branch’s files, but awkward ‘national comrades’ or those who drew attention to themselves were kept under constant observation and could, for example, be summoned to an ‘interview’ with the local branch leader.²⁷

The local branches drew on this fund of information when they had to provide details of people’s political attitudes, such as in the case of promotions in the civil service, when people were claiming various kinds of state aid (such as loans for married couples or child support), or if they were applying to be admitted into state licensed professions. Enquiries might also come from private companies who wanted reassurance from the Party before appointing or promoting people.²⁸ Detailed information in the reports of local branches make clear to what extent the local branch leaders, helped by volunteer assistants and informers from the neighbourhood, were capable of keeping tabs on the everyday life of ‘their’ national comrades. It is therefore hardly surprising that local branches were urged to assist the Security Service (SD) as a matter of routine.²⁹ It has also been shown that when starting investigations the Gestapo relied on information held by local Party offices.³⁰ The Party organization, in other words, prepared the ground for a police state that ruled by terror.

The significance of this surveillance, carried out close to home by an army of several hundred thousand Party functionaries, cannot be overestimated when it comes to explaining the conformity and docility of the overwhelming majority of the population under the Nazi dictatorship and the way in which the Nazi vision of a ‘national community’ actually worked.

In addition to the political organization proper, the NSDAP had formations (which had no individual legal status and no funds of their own), associated organizations (which had both but were under the financial supervision of the Reich Party Treasurer), and other groups supervised by it but whose relationship to the Party was not clearly defined from a legal point of view.³¹ Formations and associated organizations and other groups were as a rule structured in a similar hierarchical way to the Party and were thus represented by their own head offices within the Reich Party headquarters. Their ‘offices’ within the Gau and district headquarters and the organizations within the local Party branches were subordinate to this head office in matters relating to their specialist role. At the same time, these offices were subordinate in political matters to the various territorial Party leaders in charge at the different levels of the Party hierarchy [Gau, district, local branch]. This dual structure inevitably caused problems in practice but it also produced a finely graduated, stable, and at the same time flexible organizational machine.

Examples of such formations and associated organizations were the SA, which after 1934 became much less important, and the SS, which gained from the SA’s loss of status and, after being combined with the police, formed the core of a self-contained, continuously expanding fiefdom. Particularly relevant here are the mass organizations that after 1933 had set about supervising individual sectors of German society and since then had greatly expanded. In a speech in December 1938 to NSDAP district leaders, Hitler described his view of how ‘national comrades’ were to be gathered into the fold. We shall ‘train’ the ‘new German youth’, he said, ‘from an early age for this new state’. After four years in the Jungvolk and four in the Hitler Youth ‘we shall admit them immediately to the Party, the Labour Front, the SA or the SS, or the NSKK, and so on. And when they have been in them for two years or a year and a half they will be put in the Labour Service and will have the edges knocked off them for another six or seven months. . . . And whatever they still have in the way of class consciousness or social superiority after six or seven months will be worked on for another two years by the army, and when they return after two, three, or four years we’ll take them back immediately into the SA, SS etc., so that there’s no chance of them backsliding, and then we’ll have them for life.’³² The individual organizations were to devote themselves zealously to this task.

Figure 7.  A private celebration watched over by the ‘Führer’. This wedding group from 1936 used a family photo to make a clear statement of loyalty.

Source: IMAGNO/Skrein Photo Collection

The German Labour Front (DAF ), which in October 1934 Hitler charged with ‘forming a true German national and productive community’,³³ succeeded gradually in encompassing the great majority of people in employment. Membership rose from seven to eight million in the middle of 1933 to around 14 million in March 1934, over 22 million in 1939, and finally 25 million in 1942.³⁴ It became impossible to imagine everyday working life without the DAF’s practical involvement in it and it was very difficult to avoid becoming a member. It offered legal advice and special mentoring programmes for working women and young people. It was active in the provision of healthcare in the workplace and also in vocational training.³⁵ Alongside those activities, the DAF built up a business empire that included, among other things, insurance companies, building societies, book clubs, and its own bank – all from the enterprises it had acquired through the incorporation of the trades unions.³⁶ The ‘Strength through Joy’ [KdF] organization, which was a subsidiary of the DAF, was concerned amongst other things with improving working conditions (‘Beauty of Work’) and it organized the ‘German firms’ productivity competition’, promoted workplace sport and participation in sports, and organized holidays, even including cruises on its own KdF cruise ships.³⁷

The National Socialist People’s Welfare Organization (NSV) also continued expanding rapidly after 1933. In addition to its labour-intensive general welfare work it expanded the assistance it gave through institutions such as the Mother and Child organization, which ran aid and advice centres and also arranged stays in the countryside for city children to improve their health, the German People’s Recuperation Support, which did the same for adults, or the NSV Youth Support. Alongside this, the NSV also created its own nursing service and took over a large number of German nursery schools.³⁸ By the end of 1939 more than 12.4 million members had joined the NSV. Only a small fraction of these were active, however, while the majority merely supported the organization by contributing money, attempting in this way to show they were doing their bit for the ‘national community’ in an area that, ostensibly at least, was relatively ‘unpolitical’.³⁹

The Hitler Youth under Baldur von Schirach, ‘Youth Leader of the German Reich,’ had since 1933 set about drawing the whole of German youth into its ambit.⁴⁰ In addition to the regular Hitler Youth commitments – ‘home evenings’ involving ideological instruction every Wednesday and sport on Sundays – the organization offered a broad range of activities. It ran music groups, marching bands, and special units of the Hitler Youth such as the aviation, mounted, naval, or motorized units (in particular to provide training in the immediate run-up to military service). It also gave members the opportunity to engage in sports that at the time were still exclusive such as tennis or fencing. At the same time the Hitler Youth was engaged in all kinds of ‘services’, such as taking part in collections or helping out at big rallies. The Hitler Youth’s own patrol service was in effect a kind of youth police that disciplined the members when they were off duty and kept a watchful eye on the other youth organizations.⁴¹

Hitler himself gave the watchword for how the Hitler Youth was to be trained in his speech to the Reichstag in 1935: ‘In our eyes the German youth of the future must be slim and supple, swift as a greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. We must train up a new type of man so that our nation is not ruined by the degenerate features of our age.’⁴² In line with these requirements, children and young people were taught to value loyalty, a sense of community, strength of will, and toughness and this was done by means of a ‘community experience’ totally geared to appeal to the mentality of the young. One of the principles was that ‘youth leads youth’ and thus the Hitler Youth was turned into a vast training ground where the NSDAP could shape the next generation. The Hitler Youth produced a total of 2 million male and female voluntary leaders for the Party.⁴³ At the beginning of 1935 3.5 million young people belonged to the organization and from 1936 onwards all ten-year-olds became members on 20 April of each year. By the end of 1936 the membership had risen to 5.4 million, and by 1939 to 8.7 million, by which time 98 per cent of young people were members.⁴⁴ In December 1936 a law was enacted making membership obligatory for all young people, male and female. The Youth Leader of the German Reich was elevated to the status of a Supreme Reich Authority and was answerable directly to Hitler.⁴⁵ It was not, however, until March 1939 that compulsory youth service was introduced.⁴⁶

In 1933/34 the National Socialist Women’s Organization [NS-Frauenschaft], which had existed since 1931, had difficulty in finding a distinctive role in the new state and there were numerous changes of leadership. Moreover, in the autumn of 1933 the German Women’s Organization [Deutsches Frauenwerk] was founded as an umbrella organization for the middle-class women’s associations that had been coordinated. It was not until early in 1934 that the regime’s somewhat confused efforts to organize women were stabilized, when Gertrud Scholtz-Klink took over the leadership of both organizations.⁴⁷ Hitler’s speech to the NS Women’s Organization at the Party Rally in 1934 can be read as giving the new women’s leader some essential pointers regarding her tasks. In it he attacked the ‘term “the emancipation of women”’ as ‘a term invented by Jewish intellectuals’ and went on to defend a conservative view of women’s roles where men and women occupied distinct spheres. A woman’s world, he said, is ‘her husband, her family, her children and her household. . . . Providence has allotted to women the care of this, her very own, world, out of which men can then fashion and construct their world.’ These two worlds should, however, remain strictly ‘separate’.⁴⁸

At the beginning of 1935 the NS Women’s Organization and the German Women’s Organization now linked to it had 1.4 million and 2.7 million members respectively.⁴⁹ Both organizations shared responsibility for the Reich Mothers’ Service, which in particular organized motherhood courses in which by 1939 more than 1.7 million women had taken part.⁵⁰ The Reich Women’s Leadership’s department for economics/home economics provided consumer advice and courses in effective household management. In view in particular of the food shortages and the Four-Year Plan’s policy of autarky, these played a significant part in the regime’s food policy.⁵¹

The NS Motor Vehicle Corps [NS-Kraftfahrkorps], which in the wake of coordination combined all the existing automobile clubs in one association, also grew steadily from more than 70,000 members in May 1933 to more than 520,000 in 1941. The organization catered for technical buffs and promoted mass motorization in a variety of ways. It took over motor racing in its entirety, gave pre-military training in its motor racing schools to future army drivers, and was active in intensive road safety training with an ideological flavour. The ‘traffic community’ that had been trained to behave correctly in traffic situations was intended to represent a solid component of the national community.⁵²

There were further formations and associated organizations that took responsibility for ‘supervising’ individual professions, such as doctors, lawyers, teachers, academics, and students.⁵³

In the light of all this activity, it is easy to appreciate the extent to which everyday life for people in the Third Reich, in the sense of the dictum Hitler propounded in 1938, came within the purview of the Party and its satellite organizations. The NSDAP was capable of covering the entire country with numerous overlapping and, in the main, dense networks that monitored and educated the population in line with NS ideology, selecting those ‘national comrades’ worthy of advancement while systematically excluding ‘community aliens’ from support and disciplining them.⁵⁴ An important aspect of this wide-ranging ‘supervision’ consisted in the various charitable and social benefits provided, the numerous leisure, further education, and other opportunities offered to ‘national comrades’ by the various Nazi organizations, which were in part a replacement for the many clubs and associations the Nazis had either closed down or coordinated. Individuals had a wide range of motives for joining the organizations mentioned above, such as obedience to a regime whose aim was as far as possible to organize the whole population; determination to take advantage of the available opportunities; the desire to play an active role in the creation of the new ‘national community’; the attempt to gain recognition by taking on tasks in the neighbourhood, and, last but not least, to work one’s way up the Party as a volunteer and so put oneself in line for a salaried post.

The massive expansion of the Party organization meant that it increasingly assumed the duties of the state. Party functionaries took on posts in the state, often carrying them out in conjunction with their Party functions or propelling themselves into positions of control over the state administration. Examples of people who combined state and Party functions at Reich level were Goebbels (Head of the Party’s Reich Propaganda/Reich Minister of Propaganda), Darré (Head of the Party’s Agriculture Office/Reich Minister of Agriculture), Himmler (Chief of the German Police/Reichsführer SS), and Hess (‘Führer’s’ Deputy/Party Minister).

Of the total of thirty Gauleiters in the Reich⁵⁵ the majority also held state offices in their particular region. In 1933 ten Gauleiters had been given supervisory powers over the states in their office as Reich governors, and two were also state prime ministers. In 1935 six Gauleiters were Oberpräsidenten, in other words simultaneously heads of the administration in Prussian provinces, while two were also heads of Bavarian government districts, and Josef Bürckel, Gauleiter of the Palatinate, also held the post of Reich Commissar in the Saarland.⁵⁶ When the German Local Government Law came into force in January 1935 the NSDAP district leaders were appointed ‘representatives’ of the Party in local councils who ‘took part in’ the appointment of mayors and local councillors.⁵⁷

Historians have regarded these developments in the main as representing the ‘usurpation’ of state functions by the Party. Viewed from this perspective, the well-organized state apparatus, bound by laws and by the established practices of administration and directed by staff with appropriate professional qualifications, was plundered by a clique of power-hungry, fanatical, and often corrupt functionaries. The result was a ‘progressive undermining of hitherto binding legal norms’, a ‘dissolution of the fabric of the state’.⁵⁸ These findings illuminate only one aspect of the relationship between Party and state in the Third Reich, however. It is important to recognize that the prevalent conflation of state and Party functions was the means by which to ensure that the system as a whole had the necessary cohesion. This admittedly happened in a largely arbitrary manner, with the result that the relationship between the Party and state apparatus remained in a sort of limbo.⁵⁹ Although it was quite normal for one person to hold Party and state offices simultaneously, this state of affairs was never openly acknowledged as being a matter of policy and on occasions it was even expressly prohibited.

Hitler’s attitude to the issue of a comprehensive reform of the administrative structure of the Reich and states and the associated problem of finally clarifying the relationship between Party and state provides a typical example of his tactical procrastination over matters to do with the formal organization of his regime. The administrative experts, most prominently Interior Minister, Frick, were agreed that a ‘Reich reform’ was urgently called for. Crucial issues were the extension of the powers of the Reich and the reorganization of its states into around fifteen to twenty administrative units of roughly the same size, which would have led to the dissolution of Prussia into its component provinces and the abolition of small states, and rested on the assumption that the boundaries of the state administration would be coterminous with the Party Gaus. This would have meant that all Gauleiters were integrated into a clear Reich structure. At first Hitler seemed open to such plans, but at the beginning of 1935 he put them on the back burner.⁶⁰ The lack of clarity in the existing structure of power – in which the old states (of extremely varying sizes) continued to exist, Reich governors were in place alongside state governments, and the Party was made up of Gaus and districts covering geographical areas that did not correspond to those of the state apparatus – was much more congenial to him. For the provisional nature of his regime helped to stoke rivalries and in the end offered him more opportunities to intervene than any ‘reformed’ Reich as recommended by the administrative experts.

Intervening and directing

Thus far, we can now draw a clear conclusion: Whereas under Hitler’s regime the government dissolved as a collective body, with individual ministries gaining greater autonomy, at the same time Hitler as dictator dispensed with any coherent control over a Party apparatus that was proliferating more and more and trespassing on state territory. Even if this attitude can be attributed to the ‘Führer’, who was in any case removed from the everyday matters of government, being reluctant to involve himself in internal disputes, his unwillingness to make decisions inevitably led in the end to rivalries and open hostilities emerging about issues of responsibilities and powers. Hitler as the ultimate source of authority was increasingly faced with these situations.

To guarantee the effectiveness of his regime, Hitler resorted to a number of strategies through which to intervene in and direct events.

First of all, in critical areas Hitler repeatedly appointed special commissioners (also called general inspectors, commissars, plenipotentiaries), equipping them with extraordinary powers. Although the use of such appointees to solve specific problems that could be dealt with more expeditiously outside the routine business of the state bureaucracy was certainly part of the tradition of administration in Germany, it had up to that point happened mainly on a temporary basis and within the constraints of the constitution. Under the permanent state of emergency with regard to the constitution that prevailed in the Third Reich and in view of the decline of collective government, special commissioners acquired particular significance. This practice was above all in line with Hitler’s anti-bureaucratic maxim of not tackling problems by bringing in the experts, but instead by investing powers to do so in men he trusted and who were personally responsible to him.

Special commissioners were, for example, given responsibility to direct large-scale projects that threatened to burst the confines of existing structures. The appointment of Fritz Todt as General Inspector of German Roads was a case in point, and the appointment of Speer early in 1937 as General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital was another. Hitler, however, invested special powers in people in particular to gain some measure of control over the economic and social crises arising from the rapid pace of rearmament. This was true of the appointment of Goerdeler as Reich Prices Commissioner in autumn 1934 and of the special powers given to Göring that culminated in summer 1936 in the Four-Year Plan. Schirach’s appointment as Youth Leader of the German Reich was linked to a special commission from Hitler to ensure that the Hitler Youth would supervise youth organizations in their entirety.⁶¹ Joachim von Ribbentrop was active in foreign affairs as a special commissioner; from 1934 onwards he was foreign policy adviser and the Reich government representative for disarmament matters as well as being the representative for foreign policy matters within the office of the ‘Führer’s’ Deputy. As a result of this dual task, the foreign affairs office he set up to deal with these responsibilities (the Ribbentrop Bureau) was a curious hybrid creation existing between the state and the Party apparatus.⁶² Josef Bürckel’s task from 1935 as Reich Commissioner for the Reincorporation of the Saarland served as a pilot for later special powers granted in connection with annexations and the establishment of occupation regimes.

At least until the outbreak of war, however, the number of special commissioners directly responsible to Hitler remained limited; they were used deliberately to cope with particular urgent issues and it would be wrong to assume that in the 1930s his style of government was determined by an impenetrable tangle of special powers. It is telling that the ambitions of those who aspired to be ‘empowered by the Führer’ were not always realized. For example, Konstantin Hierl, the Commissioner for the Labour Service, who in 1933 was appointed director of the state Labour Service within the Reich Ministry of Labour, failed in his attempt to make this function into a Supreme Reich Authority as a result of opposition from the Reich Interior Ministry. In July 1934 Hierl became Reich Commissioner for the Labour Service but under the Reich Interior Minister.⁶³ Most commissioners were attached to a ministry or were appointed by Göring after 1936 to help him deliver the Four-Year Plan and therefore did not enjoy the privilege of being answerable ‘directly to the Führer’.

Special commissioners allowed Hitler to focus on specific political issues quickly and with the minimum of red tape and to coordinate tasks that were spread over a number of different ministries. He could use this strategy to intervene in the existing administrative structure without making any fundamental changes to that structure. As the special commissioners directly answerable to Hitler were carrying out ‘commissions from the Führer’, their success was dependent on Hitler’s support and this dependence enabled the dictator to give effective and clearly visible expression to his desire to shape political developments. This created the impression of a supreme leader who tackled problems vigorously and decisively.⁶⁴

Secondly: Hitler’s personalized leadership style, his tendency to allocate responsibilities not according to people’s qualifications to do the job but according to whether he considered them loyal, led to a situation where individual senior functionaries were charged with a whole series of tasks. These could be state matters, Party matters, or other kinds of ‘special tasks’ assigned by Hitler and could well involve several political areas. Thus during the first years of the dictatorship two extensive and very heterogeneous empires arose under the aegis of Göring and Himmler. In addition to his powers as Prime Minister of Prussia, Prussian Minister of the Interior (up to 1934), Reich Minister of Aviation and Supreme Commander of the Luftwaffe, Göring had been given not only responsibility for the whole of forestry (including hunting), but in particular in 1936 the special task of implementing the Four-Year Plan. On top of all that he also had a special role in Third Reich foreign policy.⁶⁵ Reichsführer SS Himmler had gradually succeeded in placing the entire police apparatus under his command as a centralized Reich police force and putting himself in charge of all the concentration camps. He was working on uniting the SS and the police to form a single ‘state protection corps’. Since 1936/37 Himmler had also been intervening decisively in the regime’s policies towards ethnic Germans, for in his view German ethnic minorities abroad represented important outposts for a future ‘Greater Germanic’ policy.⁶⁶

Other Nazi functionaries also combined several offices: Darré, the Reich Agriculture Minister, was not only Reich head of the Party’s Agriculture Office but also head of the ‘Reich Food Estate’ (the ‘corporate’ organization that regulated the production and marketing of agricultural products) and head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office. Goebbels was not only Reich Minister of Propaganda and head of propaganda for the Party but also President of the Chamber of Culture as well as Gauleiter of Berlin. Robert Ley was not only head of the Party’s Reich organization but also head of the German Labour Front and, from 1940 onwards, Reich Commissar for Social Housing Construction. As a result, power blocs arose that, as the individual political spheres involved often had little in common or were at odds with each other, were held together only by the men who headed them and whose power resided chiefly in the personal regard Hitler bestowed on them.

Thirdly: In order to guarantee a minimum of coherence within his regime, Hitler, as in the ‘time of struggle’, summoned the Party’s Reichsleiters and Gauleiters to meetings, sometimes separately and sometimes all together. Between 1933 and the outbreak of war alone he did so twenty-seven times. These meetings sometimes lasted several days and as a rule focused on specific subjects. There was an agenda for the day, with presentations and discussions. Up to the beginning of the war they were regularly chaired by Hitler, who delivered lengthy addresses to ‘give clear direction’ to the Party elite. The speeches and content of discussions were confidential. Their purpose was to give senior Party figures essential information about the policies of the leadership and to bring them into line. In addition, these meetings offered an important opportunity to pass on information, informally as well as formally. As numerous Reichsleiters and Gauleiters were simultaneously in state posts these meetings extended far beyond the confines of the Party. Yet according to everything we know about these occasions there remained one taboo, namely any open questioning of Hitler’s policies or putting him under pressure to justify them.⁶⁷ And the most crucial aspect: no decisions were made here. Even within the sphere of the Party, Hitler was therefore careful not to make himself dependent on any supreme body.

In addition, Hitler met ten of the Gauleiters as part of their state functions at Reich governor (Reichstatthalter) conferences, which were held a number of times in the early years of the regime in order as far as possible to achieve consistency in the way policy was directed in the various states.⁶⁸ There were also regular conferences of functionaries, consultation exercises, and the like at all levels of the Party hierarchy, quite apart from informal exchanges of information, which frequently took place at social gatherings. The ‘decline’ and ‘dissolution’ of the Party and state apparatus therefore went hand in hand with redoubled efforts to create opportunities to exchange information and opinions.⁶⁹

It was therefore characteristic of Hitler’s regime that, on the one hand, the dictator allowed established organizational structures and hierarchies to wither away or where possible prevented them from developing, while, on the other, he created strategies to make it easier for him to intervene directly in individual parts of the power structure. He accepted the lack of clear direction, clarity, and consistency, also the conflicts over areas of responsibility and the rivalries. For the increasing lack of structure to his regime, the ‘chaos of offices’ frequently cited by historians, strengthened his personal position. In other words, Hitler had discovered the form of government that allowed him (by means of special commissions, the concentration of several roles in a few loyal followers, targeting information, or disinformation, at appropriate functionaries, as well as the dual system of Party and state) to enforce his political will directly as an autocratic dictator.

This form of government was also consonant with his own life-style and work-style, in which, by contrast with prevalent theories of rule, there was no clear separation between office and private sphere.

Although during his first months as Chancellor he had submitted to a disciplined work-style and a regular daily routine, read files, and arrived at cabinet meetings well prepared, he then discarded these habits the more he grew into his position as omnipotent dictator. As far as possible he avoided being incorporated into the working routine of the apparatus of power; instead he retreated from the requirements of discharging his responsibilities according to a regular timetable, and expected those in the political leadership to adapt to his largely unstructured rhythm. Hitler’s day at the Reich Chancellery has frequently been described as positively indolent.⁷⁰ He would not arrive in his office suite until the late morning, would then often make his guests – a varying group of two or three dozen office holders, who would turn up each day – wait a long time for lunch, which in turn would be extended until late in the afternoon as a result of long, rambling conversations. This was often followed by confidential discussions with individuals. In the evening there was a meal, at which discussion of political matters was frowned upon, often followed by a film (mostly a piece of light entertainment) and ending as a rule with a smaller circle of people such as adjutants, colleagues, and guests, whom Hitler liked to treat to his monologues far into the night.

Another aspect of his life were his frequent absences from Berlin. He lived for several weeks a year on the Obersalzberg and was relatively often in Munich, which as the ‘capital of the Movement’ remained the seat of the huge and expanding Party headquarters and where he still kept his private apartment. In addition, there were the annual lengthy stays in Bayreuth at the Wagner Festival and in Nuremberg for the Party Rally. Hitler also liked to travel about the country, in part to enjoy seeing it as a tourist. Even for ministers and important functionaries, therefore, direct access to him was a distinct privilege that he handed out via an opaque camarilla of adjutants. Hitler preferred confidential meetings with individuals, which often arose spontaneously out of conversations at the lunch table, in the comparatively relaxed atmosphere on the Obersalzberg or somewhere on one of his journeys, to big work sessions or regular meetings of committees and boards. His life-style thus created an almost perfect environment for his personalized style of leadership.

Hitler’s charisma

In Nazi eyes the Führer state was based on the mysterious identity of ‘Führer’ and nation, on the assumption, in other words, that ‘the nation’s will can be expressed in a pure and unadulterated manner only through the Führer’.⁷¹ Although not every action by the ‘Führer’ was dependent on the consent of the nation – for that would have been democratic⁷² – the regime was ultimately compelled to offer proof that in the medium and long term the policies pursued by the man at the top enjoyed the nation’s support and were acknowledged as being successful.

Thus the legitimacy of Hitler’s position derived essentially from his charisma; in Nazi terms he was the ‘Führer’ because the ‘nation’ ascribed to him extraordinary abilities and a historic mission, and because (in the eyes of his adherents) in the final analysis he was able to fulfil these expectations. This charismatic relationship, it should be noted, is a construction that served to legitimize the Führer state; it must not be confused with the actual basis of Hitler’s power, nor does it tell us anything about his actual abilities and successes.

First and foremost, Hitler’s regime was in fact a dictatorship. Basic rights had been abolished since February 1933; anyone was liable to be dragged off to a concentration camp for an unspecified length of time, without due process of law and without any verifiable reason, and was there at the mercy of the guards. Torture, torments of all kinds, and the murder of prisoners were part of this system and were not prosecuted. Although in the mid-1930s the number of concentration camp prisoners amounted to only a few thousand, the terror inspired by the camps left a deep impression on anyone who no more than toyed with the idea of resisting the dictatorship. The concentration camps were one part of a comprehensive system of repression that from 1936 onwards had been unified and centralized under Himmler’s direction; other branches of it were the Gestapo, the criminal police, the uniformed order police, the SS with its own intelligence service (SD), as well as armed organizations. Special courts were standing by and could be relied on to find people guilty of political crimes as defined by the regime.

All potential sources of resistance that might have prevented the system from degenerating into a dictatorship had been eliminated. The separation of powers, the carefully calibrated balance of power between the individual constitutional institutions in the Reich as well as between the Reich and the states was suspended, as was the independence of local government. The independence of the judiciary was an illusion, for the judiciary had become a tool of the regime. There were no parties apart from the NSDAP, no social organizations that were not controlled by the National Socialist movement. The Churches as a source of moral authority had been compromised. There was no longer a free press.

Secondly, the regime enjoyed an organizational monopoly. We have seen that the entire country was covered by several overlapping networks of Party organizations that guaranteed effective, close-range supervision of people’s everyday lives, without the need as a rule to deploy more muscular methods of repression.

Thirdly, the regime had taken control of the whole of the public sphere. This came about not only because it controlled the media and was continually waging propaganda campaigns, but also because Nazism (with its symbols, flags, uniforms, rituals, and involvement in very diverse activities, not least its architecture) put its stamp on public spaces and the public face of the so-called Third Reich and thus governed people’s behaviour in those public spaces. In addition to their general propaganda, the Nazis educated the young and were also involved in the continuous ‘instruction’, in other words indoctrination, of large sections of the population. Conversely, opposition voices were to a great extent excluded or made to retreat into the private realm or semi-public contexts. The machinery of repression saw to this, as well as the surveillance of the population described above carried out by the Party and its satellite organizations.

Fourthly, if the Führer state rested in the final analysis on the identity of ‘Führer’ and ‘nation’/‘people’ (‘Volk’), the concept of the nation underpinning it must not be confused with the actual population and its attitudes. ‘Volk’ in Nazi ideology was a mythic category. Huber, the National Socialist constitutional historian, summed it up: ‘The nation that shares a common ethnic descent is a supra-personal ethnic unit linking past, present, and future. It is a natural, elemental, organic, and at first unconscious entity. It is the nation as given by nature. The nation in this sense operates as the basic constituent in all political phenomena and all historical epochs, even if it has not come into people’s consciousness as such. It has frequently been overlaid, obscured, degraded, but even in these distorted and obscured forms it remains the real and crucial core.’⁷³ In other words ‘Volk’ in Nazi thinking was always a closed unit. If the Nazis’ key domestic aim was to create a ‘national community’, then the society of the Weimar Republic, which in their eyes had been divided and made degenerate by, among other things, liberalism, democracy, and Jewish influence, should be brought back to its authentic roots and the nation as an ‘entity’ should be restored.

What this ‘national community’ should look like in detail was never clearly defined, as is evident from the rather rare comments Hitler made on the subject.⁷⁴ Yet this lack of definition for one of Nazism’s key terms was in fact its strength. On the one hand the vision of a ‘national community’ was certainly attractive to many people, for it held the promise of a nation as a united, homogeneous community with a shared ethnic background that, politically and ideologically at one with itself, was working to bring about national revival. In that process social tensions would be put aside, barriers of class and status torn down, and new chances of advancement opened up. The promise of the ‘national community’ was something people were supposed to be able to catch a glimpse of already, for example in the cheering masses at big National Socialist Rallies, through ‘socialism in action’, as the Winter Aid campaign was presented in propaganda, or in the experience of community in indoctrination and holiday camps, or during the Party Rallies.

For millions of people the extension of the Party’s complex organizational machine and its satellite organizations, the creation of new administrations for specific projects, the assembling of large military forces, and the armaments boom meant concrete career opportunities and resulted over all in a rise in prosperity. The extensive political and racial purges in the realms of culture and higher education meant that intellectuals on the political right found they had new scope for working in many fields opening up under the headings of ‘Race’ and ‘Nation’. For young people the regime seemed through the Hitler Youth to be offering a new form of autonomy. It is therefore not surprising that many younger Germans in particular gained the impression that this new regime would liberate German society from outmoded class differences and rigid and anachronistic structures and herald a more mobile type of ‘national community’ based on merit.⁷⁵

On the other hand, the vagueness of the term enabled the regime to marginalize ‘alien’ minorities in this community and thus to encourage people to seek to belong to the majority community. While those Germans, such as the Jews, who were alleged to belong to an alien ‘race’ were the primary target of such exclusions, they could also be applied arbitrarily and in specific situations, such as when campaigns were mounted against ‘whingers’, intellectuals, or ‘Jewish sympathizers’. Thus the ‘national community’ had two aspects: it was both a visionary promise of a marvellous future and an important tool in domestic policy, for by this method the basis of the Führer state’s legitimacy could be redefined arbitrarily and in response to changing situations. No one who opposed the regime could belong to the ‘national community’ and such people were excluded from the mythical unity of ‘Führer’ and ‘nation’.⁷⁶

The machinery of repression, the close surveillance of national comrades, the control of the public sphere, as well as the central project of the ‘national community’ – these created the essential framework for the operation of Hitler’s charisma within the Nazi regime. In fact, no ‘pure’ or actual relationship existed between the ‘Führer’ and the ‘nation’, but rather we are dealing with the strategy by which a dictatorship that had at its disposal an extensive array of instruments to create and underpin charisma, sought to legitimize itself. The fact that Hitler had a mass following and enjoyed a high degree of popularity for considerable stretches of his period in power does not alter this situation. The fact too that in reports on the national mood and in everyday comments by Germans Hitler was often not included in criticism of the regime (summed up in the set phrase, ‘If only the Führer knew . . .’) is not a confirmation of his charisma but instead must be regarded as an instinctive response to his sacrosanct position as projected by the regime’s propaganda. Whatever criticism might be voiced about the inadequacies of the regime, belief in the ‘Führer’ had to be unsullied by doubts. That was, as it were, the operational basis on which Hitler’s regime rested.⁷⁷ In reality, however, Hitler’s dictatorship was not dependent on the consent of the majority of Germans.

The history of the period from 1933 to 1937 as presented in the preceding chapters of this book provides more than enough evidence that the identity of ‘Führer’ and ‘nation’ propagated by the National Socialists, the charismatic position occupied by Hitler as the agent of the true will of the nation, does not stand up to critical scrutiny. Even so, while the regime was not dependent on the consent of the majority, it could not simply ignore the mood of the country. Discontent was simmering beneath the surface and repeatedly flared up, to be countered by propaganda campaigns and repressive measures on the one hand, but also by material concessions and spectacular and astonishing interventions in domestic policy, although these did not divert Hitler from his fundamental political aims.

Since 1933 Hitler had been pursuing two central political objectives. In foreign policy he was out to establish a dominant position for Germany in Central Europe as the precondition for expansion and for acquiring ‘living space’ (although the timescale for this was still undecided). In domestic policy his aim was to produce the highest degree possible of unity and cohesiveness within the German nation, by whatever means possible. These two aims were inextricably linked. Internal unity at home was designed to demonstrate strength to the outside world and help to pave the way for expansion abroad, while foreign policy successes were designed to strengthen the regime domestically.

During the first months of his rule Hitler had already begun to push through his own ideas on foreign policy in opposition to the Foreign Ministry’s traditional and cautious revisionist policy. In the first instance his aim was principally to create close alliances with Italy and Britain. In order to achieve his long-term expansionist goals, from the start Hitler’s preference was to rearm at all costs and in so doing he rapidly exceeded the restrictions imposed by the established international system for arms control. His policy, however, not only put excessive strains on the economy and led to negative repercussions at home, but also quickly isolated Germany, an effect he could counteract only by means of the unexpected agreement with Poland. The alliance he sought with Italy was pushed into the distant future by his risky Austrian policy, while Britain’s very receptive attitude to limited German rearmament turned out not to herald any kind of alliance but rather represented a British attempt to draw Germany back into the international security system by making concessions. To that extent his policy towards Britain was based on a fundamental miscalculation, in spite of the naval agreement concluded in 1935.

Hitler did, however, achieve early foreign policy successes with the reincorporation of the Saarland in 1935 and the occupation in 1936 of the demilitarized Rhineland, which did not provoke any serious sanctions. In addition, relations with Italy improved to the extent that he could now set about making Austria dependent on Germany. In the course of the summer of 1936 he expanded his view of international relations, viewing them increasingly in terms of the emergence of blocs. He perceived as a threat the possibility of an alliance led by the Soviets, of which France (which had been governed by a ‘popular front’ since June 1936), Czechoslovakia, and Spain would be members. His decision to intervene in the Spanish Civil War was also motivated by a wish to prevent Spain from becoming ‘Bolshevist’. Instead he hoped to incorporate the country into a counter-alliance led by Germany, to which Italy, Poland, possibly Romania and Yugoslavia, and in the longer term Britain, and in East Asia Japan would also belong. The creation of such a bloc, which he pursued vigorously, was to his mind the decisive lever that would enable him to overcome purely revisionist policies, such as those supported by the conservative elites. Yet international recognition for his regime was still limited. The 1936 Olympic Games, with their projection of an image of Germany as a peace-loving country, did not alter this. In fact, the western powers responded to Hitler’s political initiatives by rearming on a large scale.

Although Hitler’s foreign policy successes had gained him some standing, his audacious foreign policy gave rise at the same time to considerable apprehension concerning Germany’s continued isolation and to fears of war. Above all, the accelerated pace of rearmament, which was the basis for his foreign policy, placed considerable burdens on his regime domestically and was at odds with his second great political aim, namely to weld the Germans together into a unified ‘national community’. This can be seen occurring in several phases between 1933 and 1937.

By July 1933 the so-called seizure of power had for the time being come to a close. From the late summer onwards the regime had saturated the population with an unremitting flood of mass rallies and propaganda campaigns and in October had used a referendum and fresh elections to confirm its decision to leave the League of Nations. Yet by the beginning of 1934 it was evident that propaganda was unable to disguise the reality of the problems any longer. Although in its first year in power the regime had succeeded in halving the number of statistically verifiable unemployed (a reduction that continued largely as a result of the armaments boom), the frequent assumption that the working classes, now able to support themselves, would feel grateful to the regime does not appear to have been borne out by reality. Instead people compared their circumstances with those before the crisis and came to the conclusion that they had been better off in 1928. The overheated boom created by rearmament had led, in conjunction with other factors, to distortions in the German economy, among them a fall in exports, a shortage of foreign exchange, problems with the supply of certain foodstuffs and everyday necessities, and rising prices at a time of wage stagnation. Large swathes of the population saw their standard of living fall and from 1934 onwards this situation was a constant source of complaints and dissatisfaction.

The economic situation of the masses was especially precarious during three phases: between spring and autumn 1934, in the summer of 1935, and at the beginning of 1936. In 1934 the fall in German exports led to a devastating lack of foreign exchange. For the average German this meant above all price rises coupled with shortages and a drop in quality in consumer goods. In addition to Schacht’s total reorganization of foreign trade, in November the regime responded by appointing a Prices Commissioner. In July and August 1935 a wave of price rises, alongside wage stagnation, again provoked considerable discontent among the population. The regime’s attempt in the autumn of 1935 to counter this mood with the slogan ‘Guns before butter’ soon petered out and had to be abandoned. When at the start of 1936 Germany once again found itself in an acute and serious export and foreign exchange crisis that threatened the pace of rearmament, the regime changed course: on the one hand it made more foreign exchange available to enable imports of food and on the other, led by the new Chief of Police, Himmler, it took more vigorous steps to combat ‘whingers’. In addition, the most important series of reports on the population’s mood, namely the surveys conducted by the Prussian Gestapo and by the district presidents [Regierungspräsidenten], were halted on Göring’s instructions. Thus critics of the deficiencies in food supplies, whose views were widely recorded in these reports, lost their most powerful organ inside the regime. The March 1936 elections to the councils of trust were called off as a precaution. Dissatisfaction with the regime was also spreading to broad sections of the small business population and to agriculture, in other words to population groups that before 1933 had voted in larger than average numbers for the NSDAP, for the regime was doing little to keep its promises to retailers and artisans. Agriculture was suffering as a result of pressure on costs, indebtedness, and a labour shortage.

In all sections of society there were complaints that Party functionaries were fat cats. Amongst practising Christians Hitler’s policy towards the Churches also provoked negative responses. In spite of the explicit promise of protection contained in the Concordat, the Catholic Church found itself under considerable pressure to limit the activities of its associations or even to give them up. Since 1935 the regime had been taking action against state-maintained Church schools, while in 1935, 1936, and again in 1937 large numbers of priests were accused of currency violations (and then also of sexual offences). And Hitler’s immense efforts to bring together the Protestant Churches of the individual states in one single Reich Church were unsuccessful in their ‘unifying’ aim, while managing to provoke bitter conflicts within the Church.

These facts point to one conclusion: the regime’s repeated claim during the first years of Hitler’s rule that the ‘national community’ was united was an illusion created by propaganda.

At the same time, however, Hitler developed an impressive ability to assert his leadership with confidence, in spite of the shaky ground on which he stood at home. This was an ability that had marked him out as Party leader since the earliest days of the NSDAP. From his position of extraordinary power he succeeded above all in finding spectacular solutions in tune with his own aims to profound political crises.

Between 1934 and 1936 such crises arose three times, when the precarious economic situation coincided with other factors putting a strain on domestic politics. In all three instances Hitler first bided his time and then intervened decisively to bring the complex situation under his control and reset the political agenda. In 1934 the conflict with the SA arose against the background of the foreign exchange crisis. It was also exploited by right-wing conservative circles around Papen to advance their own demands. Hitler ended the conflict with a double blow to the leadership of the SA and the conservatives and, during its aftermath, also saw off political Catholicism. In the summer of 1935, when the economic situation was once again precarious, the problems with the Churches reached crisis point, while at the same time the regime was facing its final confrontation with ‘reaction’ and the rank and file of the Party was using anti-Jewish street violence to press for the implementation of the NSDAP’s anti-Semitic programme. Hitler dealt with the situation by initiating the Nuremberg Laws, which made the ‘Jewish question’ the focus of the domestic political agenda. In 1936 the lack of foreign exchange not only led to gaps in the supply of certain foods but was threatening to halt the rearmament programme. The result was serious disagreement within the regime about future economic policy. Hitler took two measures to solve the crisis: in April he appointed Göring as Commissar for Raw Materials and Foreign Exchange and in the summer initiated and ‘promulgated’ the Four-Year Plan.

The key to Hitler’s effectiveness, as these developments demonstrate, did not lie in achieving overwhelming consensus by means of the power of his charisma, but rather in his ability to reshape extraordinarily complex situations through skilful, flexible, and (albeit after considerable hesitation) decisive political action. One should not forget, however, that he achieved this because as dictator he had at his disposal a range of instruments shaped by and geared to the implementation of his personal political vision.

^* Translators’ note: Lammers circulated draft bills to the relevant departmental ministers for comment and approval in writing in lieu of a cabinet meeting.