by Ian Kershaw
Little systematic planning for the practicalities of Reich government during a war had been carried out before the invasion of Poland in September 1939. As usual, much was improvised.183 Arising as a type of ‘standing committee’ from the Reich Defence Council (Reichsverteidigungsrat), established in 1938 (which had met on only two occasions, each time to hear lengthy speeches by Göring), a Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich (Ministerrat für die Reichsverteidigung) was set up at the end of August 1939. This seems to have been Göring’s idea, on the look-out, as always, for power aggrandizement. Hitler, for his part, was ready to make what amounted in practice to no great concession of power in order to offload some of his own administrative burden and speedily push through legislation necessary for the war effort. Not least, by pandering to the vanity of his designated successor and compensating him at the same time for his known objections to the war with Britain, he could at the same time deepen Göring’s sense of loyalty and thereby invest in a small insurance policy. No preparations had been made for such a body when Hitler gave out verbal instructions, which civil servants from the Reich Chancellery turned into a decree within a couple of hours. The head of the glaringly pointless Constitutional Department (Verfassungsabteilung) in the Reich Ministry of the Interior learnt of the existence of the new body from the newspapers. No one in his Department had been consulted.
The six permanent members of the Ministerial Council comprised Göring (as chairman), Frick (as Plenipotentiary for Administration), Funk (Plenipotentiary for the Economy), Lammers (head of the Reich Chancellery), Keitel (head of the High Command of the Wehrmacht), and Heß (Hitler’s deputy as leader of the Party). The Council was given the right to promulgate decrees on internal matters with the power of law. But it was not intended to be a ‘War Cabinet’. Neither the Foreign nor Propaganda Ministers were members. In the main the decrees were signed by Göring, Frick, and Lammers, but did not have to go to Hitler, as conventional laws did. Hitler was nevertheless careful to place restrictions on the Council which protected his own rights to overrule it if necessary. His own powers were delegated to, not replaced by, the Council.
In practice, the Council met only on a handful of occasions, for the last time in mid-November 1939. Most of the decrees it promulgated concerned relatively routine administrative and economic matters, and were brought about by the circulation of draft legislation rather than by collective deliberation. The number of ministerial representatives demanding a presence soon turned the few Council meetings that did take place into large and unwieldy affairs – precisely what it had been the intention to avoid. Göring himself lost interest. Hitler was quite happy to see the new body wither on the vine. An attempt to speed up the legislative process through a ‘Three-Man Collective’ (Dreierkollegium) of Frick, Funk, and Keitel proved no more successful. In fact, the triad never met a single time. Draft legislation was merely cleared with the other two agencies. And overlaps or clashes in competence were never resolved.
The half-hearted attempt to resurrect some form of collective government had not got off the ground. Partly, Göring’s own autocratic style, combined with an administrative incompetence arising from his belief that ‘will’ was all that mattered, meant that any collective body under his command was certain to atrophy. His own contempt for bureaucracy meant that, like Hitler, he rode roughshod over it, favouring the elimination during the war of all legislation not absolutely necessary for the defence of the Reich.184 Even more important, Hitler’s own sharp antennae towards any restriction on his power, any limitation to the principles of his untrammelled personalized rule, vitiated from the outset the possibility of a true delegation of the head of government’s role to Göring and erection of a genuine ‘war cabinet’. Such was Hitler’s sensitivity to anything which might impose limits on his own freedom of action, or constitute a possible internal threat to his position, that he would block Lammers’s feeble attempts to reinstate cabinet meetings in 1942, and even refuse permission for ministers to gather occasionally for an evening around a beer table.185
Hitler was now largely removed from the day-to-day running of the Reich. But no individual, let alone any collective body, had filled the vacuum. The administrative disorder could only grow.
Ministers, or their State Secretaries, met from time to time in Chefbesprechungen (discussions of departmental heads) to try to resolve intractable conflicts or hammer out some compromise through horse-trading. But such meetings were no substitute for governmental coordination through a cabinet. And as the war progressed they turned more and more into mass assemblies, deflecting from any possible purpose that might have been served through bargaining to balance ministerial interests.186 In any case, powerful ministers like Goebbels, with privileged access to Hitler, had little need of such a body. If their interests were not met they could take the matter to the top and usually obtain the authorization they wanted. The empire-building of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, along with the power-ambitions of the ‘Special Authorities’ like Göring’s Four-Year Plan Organization, Ley’s commissariat for housing, or Himmler’s SS, ensured that conflict was both endemic and inimical to any sense of coordinated government.187
Other than for the privileged, the only link between government ministers and Hitler was through Lammers. Hitler insisted, soon after the start of the war, that he only be approached on any issue needing resolution once all heads of government departments had made their positions clear. With the exception of purely military matters, issues were to be presented to Hitler only by Lammers.188 Any dispute was, therefore, contained at a level below Hitler. And, from his Olympian heights, he was able to side with the victors of the Darwinian struggle. It was less part of a carefully conceived ‘divide-and-rule’ strategy, than a necessary and inevitable consequence of protecting his leadership position from being dragged into the mire of the conflicts which his form of leadership – and the ideological dynamism which it incorporated – had inexorably spawned.189
The ideological drive of National Socialism was inextricable from the endemic conflict within the regime. Without this ideological drive, embodied in Hitler’s ‘mission’ (as perceived by his more fanatical followers), the break-up of government into the near anarchy of competing fiefdoms and internecine rivalries is inexplicable. Other fascist-style regimes, including Mussolini’s, did not show anything like the same pronounced tendencies towards governmental disintegration. The ‘cumulative radicalization’ in the Third Reich had its driving-force in the ‘vision’ of racial purification and empire represented by Hitler.190 The beginning of the war, as we have already seen in the context of the lurch into outright barbarism in Poland and the launching of the ‘euthanasia action’ within Germany, had sharply intensified Hitler’s own commitment to the fulfilment of long-standing ideological goals.191 But internal radicalization went beyond Hitler’s personal involvement. ‘Working towards’ his ‘vision’ was the key to success in the internal war of the regime.
Those ‘working towards the Führer’ in a quite literal sense were above all to be found in the Party and its main affiliations, especially the SS. The Party – a bureaucratic organization whose inner coherence was destroyed by its own non-bureaucratic aims of ‘leadership’ in the interests of long-term ideological goals – found itself in the war with extended and new tasks, mainly revolving around propaganda, control, and mobilization. The handing over to the Gauleiter, in their new capacity as Reich Defence Commissars, of extensive powers over civil administration at the regional level was one significant step in this direction.192 The aim was to galvanize the civil administration and mobilize the population with the same spirit that had characterized the Party itself in its ‘time of struggle’. The consequence was, however, a further inpenetrable level of administrative overlap, confusion, conflict, and chaos.
Hitler was keen to preserve his base of loyalty among the Gauleiter. Especially the senior figures among them were still given privileged access. And from time to time meetings of
Reichsleiter and Gauleiter were addressed by Hitler, naturally to sustain loyalty among some of the most trusted ‘Old Fighters’ and to convey guidelines for action, which then often fed into the state bureaucracy.193 But the meetings were scarcely more than morale-boosting pep-talks. There was no formal discussion. And, as with his government ministers, Hitler was keen to avoid meetings which were not orchestrated from above. According to Baldur von Schirach, appointed in summer 1940 as Gauleiter of Vienna, Hitler regarded any unofficial meeting of more than three Gauleiter as a conspiracy.194
At the top of the Party, Heß’s control over the Gauleiter was no greater than it had been before the war.195 His office continued to have no more than a sporadic influence on policy, but did not cease in its attempts to exert pressure on the state in areas, such as racial questions, which were central to National Socialist ideology.196 During 1940 such questions had reached nowhere near the intensity they would develop over the next year and a half. Bormann’s takeover of the de facto leadership of the Party from May 1941, and the launch of the Russian campaign the following month, would take the Party’s interference and scope for intervention in shaping the direction of policy on to a new plane. But the internal contradictions and incoherence would remain. They were beyond any individual, however powerful, to resolve. They were intrinsic to the very nature of the Party and the aims of the Leader it was striving to serve.
The greatest scope for the Party was in the occupied territories. We noted in the previous chapter the wide powers that Hitler bestowed upon Gauleiter Forster and Greiser in the incorporated areas of Poland. Building on the model already developed in Austria and the Sudetenland, the Party leaders were at the same time heads of the civil administration in their capacity as Reich Governors. This afforded the Party a far more decisive input in such areas than in the ‘Old Reich’.197 Hitler expressly emphasized in September 1940 that his Gauleiter in the east were ‘alone responsible for carrying out the tasks required of them’, and were not to be hemmed in by legal restrictions as in the Reich itself.198 After the western offensive, the same special status was granted to the Chiefs of the Civilian Administration in Alsace, Lorraine, and Luxemburg. But the ambitions of Gauleiter Josef Bürckel to head a new Reichsgau Westmark through the addition of Lorraine (where he was Chief of Civilian Administration) to his Party Gau Saar-Palatinate were unfulfilled. His powers as Party boss in his Gau continued to exist side by side (and frequently conflicting) with those of the civil authorities in Lorraine.199
Even in the East, where the Party-State dualism appeared resolved, there was no lessening of power struggles and organizational conflict.200 Here, any tension between government ministries in the Reich and Hitler’s appointees to run the occupied territories could only have one outcome. But the Party bosses, and Hans Frank as Governor General, had to reckon with the near-unconfined power of the SS running alongside their own fiefdoms. Arthur Greiser, Reich Governor of the Wartheland, was on good terms with Himmler, as he was with the Higher SS and Police Leader in Posen, Wilhelm Koppe. A member of the SS himself, Greiser was fully committed to the most radical lines of ‘ethnic struggle’ advanced by Himmler (for whom, in his new capacity as Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of Germandom, presiding over the brutal resettlement programme in the East, the ‘War-thegau’ was the most important province). The conflicts in Greiser’s area were, therefore, minimal. In the neighbouring Gau of Danzig-Westprussia Albert Forster, no less keen than Greiser in his backing for Hitler’s racial programme, was less compliant in his relations with Göring, Goebbels, Bormann, and, not least the Reichsführer-SS (of whom he is reported to have said: ‘If I had a face like Himmler, I wouldn’t speak of race at all’).201 And in the General Government, Hans Frank had increasing difficulties with the SS, especially the Higher SS and Police Leader there, Wilhelm Krüger, who could in the early years of the occupation always count upon the superior backing of Himmler, and, through him if necessary, Hitler himself.202
The clashes in the occupied territories of Poland, as the cases of Forster and Frank illustrate, were not about conflicting ideological aims. However bitter the rivalries, all those involved could have recourse to the ‘wishes of the Führer’, and claim they were working towards the fulfilment of his ‘vision’. At stake were not aims, but methods – and, above all, realms of power. The very nature of the loose mandate given to Hitler’s paladins, the scope they were given to build and extend their own empires, and the unclarity of the divisions of competence, guaranteed continued struggle and institutional anarchy. At the same time, it ensured the unfolding of ceaseless energy to drive on the ideological radicalization. Governmental disorder and ‘cumulative radicalization’ were two sides of the same coin.
IV
Radicalization of the National Socialist ‘programme’, vague as it was, could not possibly subside. The ways different power-groups and important individuals in positions of influence interpreted the ideological imperative represented by Hitler saw to it that the dream of the new society to be created through war, struggle, conquest, and racial purification was kept in full view. At the grass-roots level, banal – though for the individuals concerned certainly not unimportant – material considerations like the chronic housing shortage, the growing scarcity and increasing cost of consumer goods, or an acute shortage of farm labourers could produce resentments easily channelled towards disparaged minorities and fuelled by petty greed at the prospect of acquiring goods or property belonging to Jews. The flames of such social antagonisms were fanned by the hate-filled messages of propaganda. The mentalities that were fostered offered an open door to the fanaticism of the believers. The internal competition built into the regime ensured that the radical drive was not only sustained, but intensified as fresh opportunities were provided by the war. And as victory seemed imminent, new breathtaking vistas for rooting out racial enemies, displacing inferior populations, and building the ‘brave new world’ opened up.
With scarcely any direct involvement by Hitler, racial policy unfolded its own dynamic. Within the Reich, pressures to rid Germany of its Jews once and for all increased. In the asylums, the killing of the mentally sick inmates was in full swing. And the security mania of the nation at war, threatened by enemies on all sides and within, coupled with the heightened demands for national unity, encouraged the search for new ‘outsider’ target groups. ‘Foreign workers’, especially those from Poland, were in the front line of the intensified persecution.203
However, the real crucible was Poland. Here, racial megalomania had carte blanche. But it was precisely the absence of any systematic planning in the free-for-all of unlimited power that produced the unforeseen logistical problems and administrative cul-de-sacs of ‘ethnic cleansing’ which in turn evoked ever more radical, genocidal approaches.
Those who enjoyed positions of power and influence saw the occupation of Poland as an opportunity to ‘solve the Jewish Question’ – despite the fact that now more Jews than ever had fallen within the clutches of the Third Reich. For the SS, entirely new perspectives had emerged. Among Party leaders, all the Gauleiter wanted to be rid of ‘their’ Jews and now saw possibilities of doing so. These were starting points. At the same time, for those ruling the parts of former Poland which had been incorporated into the Reich, the expulsion of the Jews from their territories was only part of the wider aim of Germanization, to be achieved as rapidly as possible. This meant also tackling the ‘Polish Question’, removing thousands of Poles to make room for ethnic Germans from the Baltic and other areas, classifying the ‘better elements’ as German, and reducing the rest to uneducated helots available to serve the German masters. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ to produce the required Germanization through resettlement was intrinsically connected with the radicalization of thinking on the ‘Jewish Question’.204
Beginning only days after the German invasion of Poland, Security Police and Party leaders in Prague, Vienna, and Kattowitz – seizing on the notions expounded by Heydrich of a ‘Jewish r
eservation’ to be set up east of Cracow – saw the chance of deporting the Jews from their areas.205 Eichmann’s own initiative and ambition appear to have triggered the hopes of immediate expulsion of the Jews.206 The Chief of the Reich Criminal Police, Arthur Nebe, asked Eichmann around the same time, in mid-October 1939, when he could send Berlin’s Gypsies into the reservation. Between 18 and 26 October Eichmann organized the transport of several thousands of Jews from Vienna, Kattowitz, and Moravia to the Nisko district, south of Lublin. Gypsies from Vienna were also included in the deportation. At the same time, the resettlement of the Baltic Germans began.207 Within days of the Nisko transports beginning, the lack of provision for the deported Jews in Poland, creating chaotic circumstances following their arrival, led to their abrupt halt.208 But it was a foretaste of the greater deportations to come.