Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (106 page)

Hitler’s non-bureaucratic, personalised style of rule encouraged underlings to push ahead with initiatives of their own in the hopes of anticipating the Führer’s will. “The Führer can hardly order from above everything that he may want carried out at some point,” Werner Willikens, state secretary in the Prussian Agriculture Ministry, told agricultural representatives of the German states in February 1934. Therefore, it was the duty of every individual to try to work towards the Führer.
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Ian Kershaw rightly sees this idea of “working towards the Führer” as one of the keys for understanding the specific ways in which Nazi rule functioned. Those who wanted to get ahead in this system could not wait for orders from above, but rather had to anticipate the Führer’s will and take action to prepare and promote what they thought to be Hitler’s intentions. This not only explains why the regime was so dynamic but also why it became more and more radical. In competing for the dictator’s favour, his paladins tried to trump one another with ever more extreme demands and measures.
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Small-time and medium-level NSDAP functionaries—from the block wardens to the cell, local and district leaders—were also convinced that they were “working towards the Führer” when they harassed Jews and informed on putative “parasites on the people.” They were not just the willing executioners of Hitler’s ideological postulates: they drove racist policies forward.

After the Nazification of parties and associations, the unification of the offices of president and chancellor, and the self-subordination of the Reichswehr to their new commander-in-chief, Hitler had personally concentrated more power than any German ruler in history. “Responsible to no one and unable to be replaced, his position is comparable only with that of the crowned heads of state of the absolute monarchies of the past,” read an SPD-in-exile report from July–August 1934.
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In contrast to Fascist Italy, where Il Duce had to tolerate a king at his side, Nazi Germany had no institutions that could have developed into a counterweight to Hitler’s stranglehold on power.
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In his two-pronged stroke in June 1934, the dictator had eradicated SA unrest within his own movement and got rid of his critics and detractors among the conservatives. The “Führer state” was now solidly established, and in it Hitler’s charismatic authority was the most important resource for ruling. The referendums he staged after major domestic and foreign-policy decisions confirmed his overwhelming popularity. Without Hitler as the “hub of the entire National Socialist system,”
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and without the mythology of the Führer as an integrative framework, there is no explaining the regime’s astonishing cohesive force. “Fundamental to National Socialism and its system of rule,” argued the historian Karl-Dietrich Bracher, “was the fact that from the beginning to its extreme end, it stood and fell with this one man.”
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Decisions could only be made under the regime if they were derived from and thus sanctioned by the will of the Führer.

Nonetheless, it would distort the reality of the Third Reich to imagine it as a strictly governed central system in which the Führer determined everything. Hitler’s marked aversion to bureaucratic procedures and his scattershot, impulsive style of rule made such a system impossible. He demanded of all his underlings that they spare him from unwelcome, banal, everyday details. “The best man is for me the one who burdens me the least by taking responsibility for himself ninety-five out of every one hundred decisions,” Hitler declared in October 1941. “Of course there are always cases that I ultimately have to decide.”
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In other words, Hitler claimed the solitary right to decide only on fundamental issues, not on routine matters he considered ancillary; it was then that he made determined use of his function as a coordinator. However, because he was not prepared to clarify the boundaries between state administration and party organisations, bureaucratic structures and administrative rules and procedures began to corrode from within. Hitler gradually transferred to government the practice he had already used as party leader of blurring areas of responsibility and staffing offices doubly so as to encourage rivalries and protect his own power.
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As a seemingly paradoxical result, a polycratic network of competing offices and portfolios developed alongside Hitler’s monocratic dictatorship.
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For example, as we have seen in the area of foreign policy, three organisations besides the Foreign Ministry were active: the NSDAP Foreign-Policy Office, the Foreign Organisation of the Party and Ribbentrop’s office.
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In the area of publicity, the president of the Reich press office and head of Eher publishers, Max Amann, fiercely battled for power with Press Secretary Dietrich and Propaganda Minister Goebbels.
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One of the first victims of the unregulated parallel existence of the Führer’s absolute authority and a plurality of competing power centres was the principle of government by cabinet. In February and March 1933 the cabinet met thirty-one times, on average once every two days. After the Enabling Act emancipated Hitler as chancellor from the emergency decrees of the president, Hitler’s interest in conferring with his cabinet declined noticeably. Between June and December 1933, the cabinet met twenty times, in all of 1934 nineteen times, in 1935 twelve times, in 1936 four times and in 1937 six times. Its final meeting took place on 5 February 1938.
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As meetings declined in frequency, their character also changed. “In the beginning, there were still lively discussions, but later Hitler’s monologues took up more and more time,” recalled Schwerin von Krosigk.
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Gradually, the cabinet devolved into an organ for carrying out the Führer’s will, and in October 1934, all of Hitler’s ministers were required to swear an oath of loyalty to him personally. On the fourth anniversary of the appointment of the “cabinet of national concentration,” on 30 January 1937, Hitler made all his ministers members of the NSDAP, in so far as they were not already, and awarded them the Golden Party Badge. Paul von Eltz-Rübenach alone refused to accept the accolade, citing the regime’s hostility to the Catholic Church, which horrified the rest of the cabinet. “It was as if we were all struck lame,” Goebbels noted. “No one had expected that. Göring, Blomberg and Neurath profoundly thanked the Führer…But the mood was ruined.”
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Eltz-Rübenach was forced to submit his resignation that very day, and his ministry was divided up: Julius Dorpmüller became Reich transport minister, and Wilhelm Ohnesorge became Reich postal minister.

Starting in the summer of 1933, a new legislative practice established itself which rendered cabinet consultations obsolete. Before a draft law was submitted to the Chancellery, the ministers concerned had to clear up all matters of potential disagreement. State Secretary Lammers would then send the law to cabinet members with a request to register any objections by a certain date. Only when this cycle of correspondence was complete would Lammers take the law to Hitler for signature. Hitler either accepted or rejected it—he showed little interest in any of the preliminaries.
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As the cabinet declined in importance, Lammers gained more and more power since his new function as an intermediary between the ministers and Hitler put him in a key position. He was informed early on about what laws which ministers intended to formulate and could intervene in the approval process since he was able to influence Hitler depending on how he presented a given law. In November 1937, the dictator honoured the work of this senior civil servant by naming him a Reich minister, elevating him to the same level as the other cabinet members. In the last years of the regime, however, Lammers would lose a battle for power with Martin Bormann, who had become the director of the party chancellery and the “Führer’s secretary” and who would regulate privileged access to the dictator in the Führer’s main headquarters.
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The dissolution of conventional forms of government was accelerated by Hitler’s tendency to appoint special agents to take care of what he considered the most urgent tasks. As a rule, they were responsible neither to the party nor to the government administration, but rather only to Hitler personally. Their authority was based solely on the Führer’s faith in them. Hitler largely kept out of the inevitable ensuing rivalries and battles for responsibility between newly established special staffs, on the one hand, and ministries and party offices on the other. As a social Darwinist, he was guided by the idea that whoever was stronger, and therefore better, would prevail in the end. He was also convinced that this was the way to overcome bureaucratic limitations and create incentives for greater competition, which would lead to a more effective mobilisation of forces. Finally, he was also inspired by a Machiavellian strategy of divide and conquer, playing rivals off against one another, and so shielding himself against potential usurpers of his power.
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The first in this series of special agents was the engineer Fritz Todt, whom Hitler named general inspector for the German road system on 30 June 1933 with a mandate to build the German autobahn network. Eltz-Rübenach was forced to turn over his Department K (automobile and roads division) to Todt. When ministerial experts complained at a cabinet meeting on 23 November 1933, Hitler replied that a gigantic enterprise like the construction of the autobahn required the creation of a new institution. As soon as the new autobahn was complete, Hitler promised, this new institution would be incorporated back into the Transport Ministry.
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But because the energetic Todt performed his duties to Hitler’s great satisfaction, in December 1938 he was also named general agent for the regulation of the construction industry. The companies and projects he directed were the genesis of the Organisation Todt, whose first projects included the construction of the West Wall along the Reich’s western border. It was the only special organisation in Nazi Germany to bear the name of its director.
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The development of the Labour Service was a further example of how Hitler prised areas of responsibility away from traditional governmental institutions and entrusted them to individuals. In the summer of 1931, Heinrich Brüning had introduced a volunteer labour service, nominating a Reich commissioner to direct it in July 1932. After Hitler became chancellor, the new labour minister, the head of the Stahlhelm, Franz Seldte, laid claim to this position. Hitler, however, gave the job of heading the service to former Colonel General Konstantin Hierl, whom he appointed to the rank of a Labour Ministry state secretary in early May 1933. The result was permanent friction between the labour minister and the “Reich labour leader,” as Hierl started calling himself in November 1933, which Hitler put an end to in early July 1934 when he officially appointed Hierl Reich commissioner for the labour service. He was formally responsible to Frick’s Interior Ministry, but de facto Hitler’s support made him the director of a special office. With the introduction of mandatory labour service in 1935, it developed into a huge organisation that forced hundreds of thousands of young men and women between the ages of 18 and 25 to perform six months of “voluntary labour for the German people.”
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Much the same as Hierl, Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach sought to expand his organisation into a “superior Reich office” and transform the Hitler Youth into a mandatory state institution that would inculcate the National Socialist world view in all young males between the ages of 10 and 18. In late 1935, Hitler approved the basics of this plan. In the spring of 1936, Hans Heinrich Lammers passed on a draft Reich Youth Law to the relevant government offices, but it met with resistance. Education Minister Bernhard Rust protested against the idea of “separating the guidance of youth completely from the Reich’s existing responsibility to educate young people.” Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk objected to the creation of a “new, expensive apparatus separate from the general government administration,” and Frick complained that “the establishment of a new Reich special administration disrupts the necessary organic unity between the state and its administration.”
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Apparently surprised by such stiff opposition, Hitler decided to delay the drafting of the law. It was not until October that Schirach was able to discuss the project with Hitler and get him to reaffirm his support. On 1 December 1936, the cabinet approved the Law Concerning the Hitler Youth that made enrolment in the organisation mandatory. Prior to that Hitler had urged his education minister not to voice his reservations in the cabinet meeting. Thanks to Hitler’s support, Schirach triumphed over the ministries. Paragraph 3 of the law gave him and the leadership of the Reich Youth “the status of a superior Reich office based in Berlin” and made them responsible “directly to the Führer and Reich chancellor.”
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The clearest and most significant example of what the historian Martin Broszat called the “amalgamation of party and state functions in a special organisation immediately under the Führer” was the creation of the SS power complex.
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From their Bavarian springboard between the autumn of 1933 and the spring of 1934, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich gradually succeeded in taking over the political divisions of the police in all the German states. Only in Prussia did their urge for expansion meet with resistance—from State President and Interior Minister Göring. In April 1934, the two sides agreed that Himmler would become inspector of the Prussian secret police and Heydrich director of the Secret Police Office. Although formally that subordinated Himmler to Göring, in practice it gave the SS leadership control over the political police force. Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, where the Gestapo had their headquarters, soon became synonymous with the National Socialist system of terror.
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